[,0O 


The  Place  of  History 
in   Education 


BY 


J.    W.    ALLEN 

FORMERLY   BRAKENBURY   EXHIBITIONER,    BALLIOL  COLLEGE, 

OXFORD  J    HULSEAN   PROFESSOR   OF  MODERN   HISTORY 

AT   BEDFORD   COLLEGE,    UNIVERSITY  OF   LONDON 

2.34^5 


NEW    YORK 

D.    APPLETON    AND    COMPANY 

1910 


CONTENTS. 


PAGK 

I.    THE    FIRST    QUESTION    .....  1 

What  do  we  mean  by  "  History  "  ? — The  subject- 
matter — History  a  form  of  thought — What  is  that 
form  to  be  ? 

II.    HISTORY    AS    A    SCIENCE  ....  6 

Nature  of  scientific  study — History  of  England 
from  this  point  of  view — A  problem  in  causation 
— Can  it  be  solved  ? 

III.    CERTAIN    RADICAL    OBJECTIONS         .  .  .  15 

Complexity  of  factors — Free-will — The  individual 
and  the  mass — The  action  of  masses — Great  men, 
coincidence,  weather  and  accident  in  general. 

IV.    CERTAIN    PRACTICAL    INFERENCES    .  .  .  41 

Irrelevant  aspects  :  the  dramatic,  picturesque,  &c. 
— Moral  judgments — Other  dangerous  tendencies 
— Political  bias — The  illusion  of  the  present — Need 
of  detachment. 

V.    AN    ILLUSTRATION  .....  64 

The  questions  involved  in  the  problem  of  the  com- 
mencement of  the  Hundred  Years'  War. 


vi  Contents. 

VI.    HISTORY    AS    A    PAGEANT         ....  79 

Personal  points  of  view — The  demand  for  history 
as  a  pageant — Its  reasonableness — The  two  kinds 
of  history. 

VII.    OF    RECONCILIATION      .....  98 

An  impossibility — A  division  of  labour  wanted — 
What  kind  of  history  are  we  to  teach  ? 

VIII.    OF    EDUCATION     ......         106 

Why  teach  anything?  —  "Technical"  and  other 
education — Lack  of  system — To  lay  the  founda- 
tions of  sound  thinking,  the  right  aim  of  a  schol- 
astic system — Training  of  the  intelligence — Need- 
ful knowledge — Moral  training. 

IX.    OF    EDUCATIONAL    HISTORY     ....        137 
Need  of  a  national  system — The  knowledge  we 
want  and  don't  want — "  English  "  history — Eng- 
land and  Europe — Essential  things. 

X.    OF    THE    EDUCATIONAL    VALUE    OF    HISTORY        .         156 
Value  of  history  for  thought — Bearing  on  social 
and   political   speculation — Value  in   intellectual 
training — The  charge  of  dullness. 

XI.    OF    THE    EDUCATIONAL    VALUE    OF    HISTORY 

MORAL  ......         170 

What  the  teaching  of  history  may  possibly  do  for 
morals  ;  and  what  it  must  not  do. 

XII.    CONCERNING    DIFFERENCE    OF    SEX  .  .         180 

That  women  need  not  be  educated,  except  "  tech- 
nically," differently  from  men. 

XIII.    THE    INTRODUCTION    TO    HISTORICAL    STUDY         .         187 
History  in  primary  schools — Impossibility  of  teach- 
ing   history    to    young    children  —  "Historical" 
stories  and  fairy  tales— An  introduction  needed — 
The  sociological  basis — Transition  to  history. 


Contents.  vii 

XIV.    A    FINAL    DIFFICULTY  :     THE    POINT    OF    VIEW     .        204 
The   subjective   difficulty  —  History    affected   by" 
unhistorical   opinion  —  Nature    of   the   following 
illustrations. 

XV.    ILLUSTRATION    OF    THE    DIFFICULTY — 

THE  REFORMATION   (a)     .  .  .  .  .210 

THE   REFORMATION    (b)      .  .  £22 

THE   REFORMATION   (c)     .  .  .  .  ,  £36 

XVI.    CONCLUSION 


The  foregoing  statements  unhistorical— Measures 
of  historical  value — Historical  progress. 


247 


XVII.    POSTSCRIPT  ......        255 


s. 

J 

el 


THE    PLACE    OF    HISTOEY 
IN    EDUCATION. 


I. 

THE   FlftST   QUESTION. 
2  3  fo^^ 

Whether  we  set  out  to  teach  History  or 
to  consider  its  place  in  a  system  of  educa- 
tion, it  would  seem  prudent  to  arrive, 
first  of  all,  at  an  understanding  of  what 
we  mean  by  "  History."  There  have  been 
people  who,  in  class-rooms  or  through  the 
press,  have  taught  history  without  ever 
having  attempted  to  attain  such  under- 
standing. Perhaps  they  thought  the 
question  a  simple  one.  It  has  not 
proved  so. 

About  the  subject-matter  of  history  there 


2     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

is,    at    the    present    time,    no    serious    dis- 
agreement.    We   are   agreed   that  it  is   not 
the    doings    of    kings    and    highly    placed 
people ;  that  it  does  not  consist,  specifically, 
in  wars  and  revolutions  or  in  parliamentary 
proceedings    or    in    law.     We    have    known 
this     for     some     little     time.     Montesquieu 
and   Gibbon    were    aware    of   the   fact,   and 
Macaulay     knew     it.        "No     past     event," 
declared   the   last-named  great  writer,   "has 
any   intrinsic   importance."     Thomas   Arnold 
defined    history    as     "the    biography    of    a 
society,"    so    that,   according    to    this   defin- 
ition,   its     subject-matter     would     be     the 
life    of   a    society.      The    definition    is    only 
spoiled    by    the    presence    of    the    article. 
The   subject-matter    of   history    is    the    life 
of  all   societies.      In   other  words,  it  is  the 
past    life     of    humanity,     because     of    any 
condition   of  humanity  that  was   not   social 
we    have    no    evidence    at    all.      So   far   we 
can    all    agree,    because    we    all    think    now 
of  the   past   life   of  all   human   societies   as 
more    or    less    connected.      Assyrian,    Baby- 


The  First  Question.  3 

Ionian,  Phoenician,  Egyptian,  Greek,  and 
Roman  society  are  all  a  nexus,  and  Rome 
connects  with  all  that  has  come  later  in 
Europe.  We  do  not  doubt  that  if  we 
knew  more  we  should  be  able  to  spread 
the  net  wider, — wide  enough,  perhaps,  at 
last,  to  include  the  whole  human  race. 
Within  historic  time,  at  all  events,  the 
connections  become  closer  and  more  ex- 
tensive. Europe,  Asia,  and  Africa  act  and 
react  on  each  other;  America  and  Australia 
tend  to  become  outlying  parts  of  Europe. 
We  cannot  well  define  the  subject-matter 
of  history  otherwise  than  as  the  past  life 
of  humanity. 

But  this  is  not  history,  any  more  than 
the  stars  in  their  courses  are  themselves 
astronomy.  History  is  the  result  of  a 
treatment  of  this  subject-matter  by  the 
human  mind.  History  is  a  form  of  thought. 
If  I  ask  what  a  loaf  of  bread  cost  in  the 
fourteenth  century,  or  how  safety  matches 
came  into  being,  I  am  making  history  in 
the  proper  sense.     But   when    I    go   out   for 


4     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

a  walk  I  am  not  making  history,  I  am 
only  adding,  very  minutely,  to  its  subject- 
matter. 

We  come,  thus,  to  our  question.  The 
subject  -  matter  of  history  being  the  past 
life  of  humanity,  what  is  history  to  be? 
History  itself  will  be  the  result  of  our 
study  and  thought  concerning  that  past  of 
man :  what  is  to  be  the  end  and  aim 
of  that  study  and  thought?  What  is  that 
form  or  kind  of  history  which  will  answer 
most  fully  to  our  needs  and  desires,  and 
be,  therefore,  of  most  value  to  us? 

This  question  has  been  answered  in 
various  ways,  and  it  is  not  possible  that 
different  types  of  mind  should  return  the 
same  answer  to  it.  The  answer  true  for 
one  mind  is  not  true  for  another.  It  is, 
for  all  of  us,  a  question  of  what  he  or 
she  values  most.  You  may  say,  if  you 
please,  that  it  is  a  question  of  what  he 
or  she  ought  to  value  most.  Unfortunately, 
to  the  question  so  put  there  is  no  answer. 
To    know    what    is    absolutely    best    for    us 


The  First  Question.  5 

we  should  have  to  know  the  meaning  of 
the  whole  world,  all  the  value  and  mean- 
ing of  life  and  death.  If  we  could  know, 
in  this  absolute  sense,  what  we  want, 
we  should  know  the  end  of  our  lives,  if 
not  of  all  life.  Till  we  know  this  we  can 
give  no  answer  to  our  question  that  will 
be  true  for  all  of  us. 


6 


II. 

HISTORY   AS  A  SCIENCE. 

Let  us  look,  first,  at  that  view  of  history 
which  presents  it  as  what  is  called  a 
science.  And  first  of  all  it  should  be 
stated  that  this  view  —  this  answer  to  our 
main  question — has  for  the  last  fifty  years 
or  so  been  becoming  steadily  more  domi- 
nant in  the  world  of  historical  research  and 
historical  writing.  In  England  the  year 
1857  was  marked  by  the  commencement  of 
the  publication  of  Buckle's  '  History  of 
Civilisation  in  England,'  and  also  of  the 
two  great  series,  the  '  Rolls  Series '  and  the 
'  Calendars  of  State  Papers.'  In  France  and 
in  Germany  the  systematic  collection  and 
publication  of  evidential  documents  of  all 
kinds  had  begun   long  before.     The  'Monu- 


History  as  a  Science.  7 

menta  Germanise  Historica'  dates  from  1826. 
The  great  mass  of  modern  historical  re- 
search is  justified  from  the  scientific  point 
of  view  and  hardly  from  any  other.  But 
there  is  this  to  be  added.  Though  it  is 
undeniable  that  historical  research  and  his- 
torical writing  have  been  steadily  becoming 
more  "scientific"  in  method  and  in  aim,  this 
fact  is,  of  itself,  no  reason  for  pinning  our 
faith  to  what  may  conceivably  be  a  mere 
passing  phase  in  the  history  of  the  relation 
of  the  human  mind  to  the  records  of  its 
past.  We  must  not  follow  the  fashion  in 
this  or  in  other  things,  but  try  to  get  to 
the  root  of  the  matter. 

When  we  say,  as  Professor  Bury  said  in 
his  inaugural  lecture  at  Cambridge  in  1903, 
that  "  History  is  a  science,  no  less  and  no 
more,"  what  is  it  that  we  mean  ?  The 
essential  characteristic  of  scientific  study  is 
that  it  aims  at  reaching  objective  truth. 
It  seeks  to  establish  the  real  relations  of 
things.  In  aim,  and  therefore  in  method, 
it    is    wholly    intellectual.       It    demands    a 


8     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

suppression  of  the  merely  personal.  If  I 
study  a  language  for  the  sake  of  talking  it, 
or  in  order  to  enjoy  its  literature,  I  am 
not  studying  it  scientifically.  If  I  study 
painting  or  literature  for  the  aesthetic 
pleasure  to  be  derived  therefrom,  my 
study  is  not  scientific  however  much  I  may 
learn.  If  I  study  the  past  life  of  humanity 
for  the  sake  of  drama  or  the  picturesque, 
or  with  a  view  to  modern  politics,  my 
work  is  not  scientific.  Science  is  concerned 
with  the  questionings  of  the  mere  intellect. 
Now  there  are,  it  may  be  said,  three  funda- 
mental questions  which  the  intellect  asks  of 
a  thing.  It  asks,  firstly,  how  the  thing 
came  to  be  what  it  is ;  it  asks,  secondly, 
what  are  its  actual  and  immediate  relations 
to  other  things,  which  include  all  the  modes 
of  its  activity ;  it  asks,  in  the  third  place, 
what  are  the  consequences  of  these  relations, 
and  how  the  thing  itself  is  being  modified 
by  action  and  reaction.  Among  these  ques- 
tions there  is  no  first  or  last :  they  are  con- 
current.    But,    further,    the    intellect   desires 


History  as  a  Science.  9 

to  grasp  and  to  express  the  quality  of  the 
thing,  and  it  seeks  to  do  this  in  terms  of 
the  thing's  tendencies.  This  expression  of 
the  quality  of  the  thing  sums  up  the  know- 
ledge we  have  gained  of  it,  and,  in  regard 
to  living  things,  will  amount  essentially 
to  a  statement  of  whether  the  thing  is 
still  growing  or  tending  to  decay  and  dis- 
solution. It  is  the  effort  to  answer  all 
these  questions  about  things  that  produces 
science.  And  all  these  questions  are  con- 
cerned essentially  with  causation ;  not,  that 
is,  with  the  idea  of  cause  or  with  the  nature 
of  it,  but  with  those  connections  and  sequences 
which  we  take  to  be  causal.  Science  might, 
perhaps,  be  defined  as  that  which  is  concerned 
with  the  causation  of  things  ;  and  the  caus- 
ation of  things  is  their  past,  their  present, 
and  their  future,  since  nothing  is,  but  all 
things  are  becoming. 

Let  us  now  apply  this  conception  to  his- 
torical study.  Our  subject-matter  is  the 
life  of  humanity  in  the  past,  and  we  must 
begin  with  palaeolithic  man,  or  further  back 


io     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

still  if  we  can  get  further  back.  Our  history 
is  going  to  be,  logically,  the  final  develop- 
ment of  biology.  It  is  the  latest  phase  of 
life  on  the  planet  that  we  have  to  deal 
with.  Biology  starts  with  a  simple,  single, 
living  cell,  tries  to  trace  from  it  the  de- 
velopment of  the  enormous  diversity  of 
forms  of  simply  animal  life,  and  has  some- 
thing to  say  about  the  emergence  of  man. 
Then  anthropology  takes  up  the  tale.  But 
we  can  only  distinguish  anthropology  from 
history  through  a  comparative  lack  of  evi- 
dence as  to  detail. 

Let  us  look  at  what  is  conventionally 
termed  the  history  of  England.  From  the 
point  of  view  of  science  what  does  this 
become  ?  In  the  fifth  century,  Germanic 
barbarians  begin  to  make  settlements  in 
what  had  been  Roman  Britain — barbarians 
of  the  Iron  Age  following  the  Bronze  Age 
peoples,  whose  invasion  had  preceded  that 
of  the  Romans.  There  follows  a  long  process 
of  conquest,  of  settlement,  and  of  fusion. 
As  a  result  we   get  a  number  of  little  bar- 


History  as  a  Science.  1 1 

baric  kingdoms ;  communities  economically 
simple,  structurally  confused  and  indefinite, 
possessing  little  knowledge  of  the  world 
they  lived  in  and  but  rough  arts  and 
appliances.  And  the  problem  of  English 
history  becomes  this, — out  of  those  little 
barbaric  communities  to  evolve  by  an  in- 
telligible process  the  present  British  Empire. 
It  is  a  problem  in  causation.  Generation 
follows  generation,  and  from  moment  to 
moment  things  change.  Men  learn  a  little 
and  grow  old  and  die  and  live  again,  with 
a  difference,  in  their  children.  The  little 
communities  are  kneaded  by  war  and  by  the 
Church ;  they  are  broken  up  and  re-cast 
and  forced  into  greater  coherence  and  defini- 
tion by  foreign  invaders.  From  generation 
to  generation  everything  grows — arts  and 
tools,  knowledge,  law,  wealth — and  every- 
thing grows  together.  From  generation 
to  generation  the  point  of  view  shifts,  the 
ideals  alter :  no  social  habit  lasts  very  long. 
The  little  communities  become  one ;  the 
state  becomes  a  national  monarchy,  increas- 


1 2     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

ingly  self-conscious.  Centuries  pass  and 
the  growing  community  begins  to  bud  off, 
to  throw  out  offspring,  to  establish  colonies, 
to  struggle  with  the  other  great  European 
states  for  the  control  and  exploitation  of 
lands  over  sea.  It  is  all  the  growth  of  one 
thing.  It  is  all  knitted  together  by  the 
generations  in  the  closest  manner  conceiv- 
able through  so  much  time.  And  the  prob- 
lem, the  great  problem  of  historical  science, 
is  just  this  :  to  represent  the  whole  series  of 
changes  as  connected  and  as,  to  our  minds, 
inevitable.  We  have  got  to  account,  in  the 
only  sense  in  which  we  can  account  for  any- 
thing, for  every  phase  in  all  that  great  series 
of  changes. 

It  is  a  living  thing,  we  must  remember, 
that  we  are  dealing  with ;  it  is,  really,  a 
single  living  thing.  Questions  about  the 
future  of  this  thing  answer  themselves  as 
we  go  along,  up  to  a  certain  point.  The 
fifteenth  century  is  the  future  of  the  four- 
teenth. The  point  at  which  such  questions 
do  not  answer  themselves  is  what  we  call  the 


History  as  a  Science.  13 

present.  But  we  must  not  let  that  fact  mis- 
lead us  into  imagining  that  the  past  merely 
leads  up  to  and,  as  it  were,  culminates  in  the 
present.  It  no  more  does  so  than  the  four- 
teenth century  culminates  in  the  fifteenth. 
The  movement  we  study  still  goes  on  from 
moment  to  moment ;  and  really  there  is  no 
present,  there  is  only  past  and  future.  The 
present  is  no  more  than  the  past  was.  We 
are  not  at  any  kind  of  end :  wTe  are  in  the 
middle  or  in  the  mere  beginning  of  the  pro- 
cess. There  is  an  immeasurable  future  of 
changes  ahead.  And  so  our  history  of 
England  will  end,  inevitably,  by  asking 
questions  as  to  the  future. 

When  we  have  succeeded  in  presenting  the 
whole  series  of  changes  from  the  fifth  century 
onwards  as  a  series  of  intelligible  and  inevit- 
able sequences,  we  shall  have  a  satisfactory 
account  of  what  we  conventionally  call  the 
history  of  England.  But  it  is  worth  observ- 
ing that,  even  then,  we  shall  have  no  more 
than  that.  There  is  still  the  development 
of  the  Britons  to  be  accounted  for ;   and  in 


14     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

that  development  the  Roman  occupation, 
however  important,  is  only  an  incident. 
Further  back  are  the  peoples  of  the  Bronze 
Age,  and  further  back  still  those  who  made 
Stonehenge  and  Avebury.  It  is  well  to 
recognise  at  once  that  there  is  not  the 
remotest  chance  of  ever  making  our  account 
complete.  But  if  we  could  make  it  even 
approximately  complete,  beginning,  let  us 
say,  with  the  Roman  occupation,  a  great 
thing  would  have  been  done.  How  is  it  to 
be  done,  and  can  it,  in  the  nature  of  things, 
be  done  at  all  ? 


i5 


III. 

CERTAIN   RADICAL   OBJECTIONS. 

Evidently  the  task  is  a  very  difficult  one. 
The  movement  of  any  society  as  a  whole 
must  be  the  sum  of  all  the  actions  of  all  its 
individuals  and  of  all  such  actions  of  other 
individuals  as  relate  to  it  in  any  way.  The 
complexity  of  the  factors  concerned  in  the 
birth  of  a  world  out  of  chaos  must  be 
slight  as  compared  with  the  complexity 
of  the  psychological  factors  concerned  in 
the  evolution  of  a  society.  The  origin  of  a 
species  or  of  a  group  of  species  must  needs 
be  a  simple  matter  in  comparison. 

Looking  at  this  extreme  complexity  of  the 
factors  involved,  we  might  well  despair  of 
ever  disentangling,  even  roughly,  the  causes 
of   any    social    phenomenon.      Just    consider 


1 6     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

the  complexity  of  the  process  which  issues 
in  the  commonest  and  most  trivial  human 
acts.  You  decide,  doubtfully,  to  invite 
some  acquaintance  to  dinner.  Consider  how 
much  may  go  even  to  such  a  petty  pro- 
ceeding. Your  acquaintance,  perhaps,  is  this 
or  that  that  is  objectionable.  He  is  ap- 
proved of  by  Mr  X ;  but  Mrs  Y  strongly 
disapproves  of  him.  He  may  make  himself 
useful ;  but  his  manners  are  atrocious.  Or 
he  is  of  no  earthly  use,  but  has  charming 
manners.  It  is  a  matter  of  slowly  gener- 
ated habits  and  a  slowly  generated  point  of 
view.  Little  considerations  of  self-interest, 
resting  unconsciously  on  a  basis  of  judg- 
ment as  to  what  is  worth  having  in  life, 
move  you  this  way  or  that.  Little  notions 
of  social  propriety  pull  one  way,  little  curi- 
osities, perhaps,  the  other.  In  the  end  a 
balance  is  struck,  and  you  act — without  even 
knowing  why.  Possibly  your  chief  motive 
for  action  is  something  you  are  almost  un- 
conscious of.  So  mixed,  as  we  say,  are 
motives  that  people  rarely  know  why  they 


Certain  Radical  Objections.       17 

do  a  thing.  Consider,  also,  how  difficult 
it  is  to  be  certain  of  what  any  one  will  do 
under  given  circumstances.  And  consider 
the  things  that  people  do  do  ! — the  absurd 
things,  the  futile  things,  the  wholly  un- 
expected things.  But  the  movement  of 
society  is  all  compact  of  such  complex  and 
mysterious   doings. 

One  thing  is  certain,  that  in  dealing  scien- 
tifically with  this  maze  of  thought  and  action 
which  is  human  history,  we  shall  have  to 
assume  determinism  as  an  expression  of  the 
truth.  We  shall  have  to  assume  that  what- 
ever a  man  does  he  does  as  a  necessary  con- 
sequence of  the  interaction  between  his  nature 
at  the  given  moment  and  his  surroundings 
at  the  given  moment.  We  shall  have  to 
assume  that  of  absolute  free  will  there  is 
none  at  all. 

That  there  may  be  no  doubt  as  to  the 
nature  of  the  assumption  to  be  made,  let  us 
take  a  simple  illustration.  I  am  sitting  at 
home  and  feeling  stuffy.  I  should  like  to 
go  out  into  the  clear  air  and  get  a  look  at 


1 8     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

the  sky.  On  the  other  hand  I  do  not  want 
to  go  out.  It  is  slushy  under  foot  outside, 
and  raw,  and,  moreover,  there  are  some  notes 
I  ought  to  make,  only  I  don't  want  to 
make  them.  So  I  sit  balancing.  Now  I 
am  physically  quite  free  to  go  out  or  stay 
in  as  I  choose.  If  I  make  up  my  mind  to 
go,  there  is  nothing  to  prevent  my  going ; 
if  I  choose  to  stay,  I  can  stay.  But  there 
ends  my  freedom.  When  I  say  "  If  I  make 
up  my  mind,"  I  am  assuming  that  it  does  not 
make  itself  up.  But  that  is  just  what  it 
does.  A  highly  intelligent  onlooker — that 
is,  one  much  more  intelligent  than  any  of 
us,  and  one  who  knew  much  more  about 
myself  than  I  know  —  might  know  exactly 
what  is  going  to  happen.  It  is  certain, 
already,  how  my  hesitations  will  end.  The 
interaction  between  me  and  my  surround- 
ings evolves  motives,  and  what  I  call  motives 
are  just  a  part  of  the  process  by  which  my 
mind  makes  itself  up.  And  so,  equally,  all 
my  actions  are  a  necessary  consequence  of 
the  action   of  surrounding  things  upon  me  : 


Certain  Radical  Objections,       19 

and  I  never  could  have  done  anything  but 
what  I  did  do.  The  determination  of  my 
action  is  just  as  complete  and  rigid — though 
vastly  more  complex  than  that  —  as  the 
determination  of  the  exact  course  of  a 
stone  that  I  throw.  And  so  universally. 
Just  as  no  stone  could  lie  anywhere  but 
where  it  lies,  so  no  human  action  in  the 
past  could  really  have  been  other  than  it 
was,  and  all  things  are  for  ever  as  they 
must  be. 

"  With  the  first  clay  they  did  the  last  man  knead ; 
And  there,  of  the  last  harvest,  sowed  the  seed : 

And  the  first  morning  of  Creation  wrote 
What  the  Last  Dawn  of  Beckoning  shall  read." 

This  is  a  very  cheering  view,  because  it 
makes  a  science  of  history  possible. 

Nevertheless,  there  are  people  who  revolt 
at  this  doctrine,  as  there  are  also  people 
who  misunderstand  it.  It  is  sometimes 
confused  with  what  is  called  fatalism.  In 
truth  it  is  absolutely  opposed  to  this.  By 
fatalism  is  apparently  meant  a  belief  that 
whatever    you    do    the    result    will    be    the 


20    Place  of  History  in  Education. 

same.  If  it  be  ordained  by  fate  that  you 
are  to  be  killed  on  a  certain  day,  killed 
you  will  be,  whether  you  fight  bravely  in 
the  battle  or  whether  you  run  away.  But 
determinism  asserts  that  the  consequences 
of  different  things  will  always  be  different, 
and  of  similar  things  always  the  same : 
and  these  two  assertions  are  one.  But  we 
must  not  be  betrayed  into  any  discussion 
of  the  idea  of  cause. 

There  remains  the  fact  that  numbers  of 
people  who  understand  the  doctrine  of 
determinism  revolt  at  it  and  assert  a 
mysterious  freedom  of  the  will.  Indeed 
very  few  people  really  believe  that  deter- 
minism expresses  the  truth.  And  there 
remains  the  more  important  fact  that  the 
theory  of  determinism  cannot  be  demon- 
strated as  truth.  Now,  just  as  far  as  it 
goes,  the  assertion  of  freedom  of  the  will 
is  an  objection  to  or  a  denial  of  the  pos- 
sibility of  a  science  of  history.  Still,  unless 
your  objection  on  this  score  is  very  radical, 


Certain  Radical  Objections.      21 

some  compromise  is  perhaps  possible.  We 
have,  perhaps,  put  the  matter  rather  too 
absolutely.  There  is  no  logical  necessity 
for  the  assumption  of  a  quite  absolute  and 
unlimited  determinism.  If  the  great  mass 
of  human  action  is  strictly  determined,  that 
will  be  sufficient  for  the  purposes  of  scien- 
tific history.  History  must  essentially  deal 
with  the  action  of  masses — that  is,  with 
human  action  in  its  commonest  forms ;  and 
if  we  may  take  that  as  strictly  determined, 
we  can  manage.  If  any  one,  for  instance, 
thinks  that  when  his  "  conscience "  is 
aroused  he  becomes  mysteriously  free,  that 
belief  does  not  constitute  an  absolute  denial 
of  the  possibility  of  historical  science.  If 
that  be  true,  then  our  margin  of  error — 
the  amount  of  error  in  all  our  generalisa- 
tions concerning  cause  —  will  merely  be 
greater  than  it  otherwise  would  be. 

O 

In  this  way  we  get  over  an  initial  diffi- 
culty. But  we  have  doue  no  more  than 
that.     Our  assumption   of  determinism   does 


22     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

not,  of  itself,  help  us  to  explain  anything. 
We  are  practically  no  nearer  the  explana- 
tion of  any  individual  action  when  we 
have  assumed  that  it  is  strictly  determined. 
History  deals  with  masses,  and  so  long 
as  we  are  dealing  with  masses  the  nature 
of  the  difficulty  is  more  or  less  obscured. 
We  are  disposed  to  treat  masses  as  though 
they  were  not  masses  of  individuals,  and 
to  talk  glibly  and  dogmatically  about  the 
motives  and  feelings  of  masses  with  a  sense 
of  assurance  we  never  feel  in  dealing  with 
any  single  person.  But  the  difficulty  be- 
comes clear  and  is  brought  painfully  home 
to  us  when  we  come  to  deal  with  "great 
men " ;  and  not  only  with  men  who  may 
be  called  "  great "  for  their  own  virtue,  but 
with  any  individual  who,  by  reason  of  his 
legal  position  or  the  way  in  which  he  is 
regarded,  is  able  to  exercise  an  apparently 
great  influence  over  the  lives  of  others, 
and  through  them  over  the  future.  "  Some 
are  born  great,   some  achieve  greatness,  and 


Certain  Radical  Objections.      23 

some  have  greatness  thrust  upon  them." 
It  matters  not  which  it  is :  the  same 
difficulty  manifestly  confronts  us  with  each 
of  them. 

However  rigidly  determined  the  conduct 
of  individual  men  may  be,  it  can  only  be 
explained,  if  at  all,  in  the  most  crude  and 
roughly  approximate  manner ;  and  in  the 
record  of  the  past  we  are  met  at  every 
turn  by  men  upon  whose  individual  action 
much  seems  to  depend.  The  action  of  these 
men — kings,  soldiers,  statesmen,  prophets — 
baffles  us. 

Whenever  you  come  upon  a  man  whose 
individual  action  appreciably  affects  the 
course  of  change,  in  whatever  degree,  there 
you  have  something  which  generalisation 
necessarily  ignores  more  or  less  completely, 
and  something  which  you  can  hardly  hope 
satisfactorily  to  explain.  Attempts  have 
been  made  to  show  that  the  action  of  such 
men  is  really  unimportant.  Napoleon,  it  is 
said,   creates  a  great  commotion  and   causes 


24     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

a  couple  of  millions  of  premature  deaths ; 
but  all  the  fuss  only  results  in  hurrying  a 
little  the  inevitable  changes  all  over  West 
Europe  prepared  by  the  eighteenth  century. 
But  such  attempts  are  mere  evasions  of  the 
main  difficulty.  Conceivably  we  might  get 
over  the  difficulty  in  this  manner  if  Napoleon 
and  Peter  the  Great  represented  only  a 
class  of  very  rare  and  exceptional  cases. 
But  in  truth  the  difficulty  concerning  great 
men  is  only  part  of  a  much  larger  and 
more  fundamental  difficulty, — the  difficulty, 
that  is,  of  explaining  the  action  of  any  man 
at  all.  The  truth  is  that  Napoleon  and  Peter 
are  exceptional  cases  only  in  degree.  On 
every  page  of  the  historic  record  you  meet 
men  who  in  some  degree  appreciably  affect 
the  course  of  things.  It  would  be  simply 
absurd  to  say  that  things  would  have  been 
just  the  same  in  the  long-run  had  none  of 
them  ever  lived.  For,  of  course,  the  real 
fact  is  that  every  man,  woman,  and  child 
who  ever  lived  has,  in  some  degree,  traceable 


Certain  Radical  Objections.      25 

or  not,  affected  the  course  of  history  by  a 
personal  action  which  defies  satisfactory 
explanation.  The  mass  is  made  up  of 
individuals  every  whit  as  mysterious  as 
Napoleon. 

How,  then,  can  we  hope  to  generalise 
successfully  concerning  the  action  of  masses 
wheiD  we  cannot  undertake  to  explain  the 
action  of  even  any  one  individual  of  those 
masses  ?  This  is  the  fundamental  difficulty 
to  which  consideration  of  the  action  of  "great 
men "  at  once  leads  us ;  and  it  seems  at 
first  sight  to  constitute  a  very  serious  ob- 
jection to  the  attempt  to  treat  history  as 
a  science.  It  looks  rather  as  though  would- 
be  scientific  history  must  issue  at  last  in 
a  series  of  mere  ingenious  guesses.  The 
historian  will  be  driven  to  bring  to  bear 
on  the  unmanageable  mass  of  his  facts  his 
own  special  ideas  of  how  man's  affairs  are 
governed.  He  will  appeal,  perhaps,  to  a 
something  not  ourselves  making  for  righteous- 
ness,   or    he    will    have    some    more    definite 


26     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

theory  of  progress,  and  he  will  systematise 
his  facts  in  accordance  with  those  ideas. 
But  in  this  case,  be  he  right  or  wrong,  he 
will  have  demonstrated  nothing,  and  the 
result  will  not  be  knowledge. 

Before  going  any  further  it  is  perhaps 
necessary  to  state  a  fact  which  assuredly 
it  ought  not  to  be  necessary  to  state.  The 
object  of  historical  science  is  not  exact  truth. 
It  is  truth  as  exact  as  we  can  get  it,  but 
it  is  not  exact  truth,  because  exact  truth  is 
manifestly  unattainable  in  this  direction. 
That  admission,  of  course,  constitutes  no 
objection  to  the  scientific  treatment  of 
history.  In  very  few  sciences  can  any 
exact  truth  be  attained,  if  even  it  can  be 
said  to  be  attained  anywhere  at  all.  What 
we  loosely  call  "  exact "  science  deals  either 
with  truths  reached  by  a  purely  logical 
process  that  starts  from  fundamental  facts 
of  our  own  mental  constitution  or  else  with 
things  that  can  be  quantitatively  measured. 
The  only  science  that  can   in  any  sense  be 


Certain  Radical  Objections.      2j 

said  to  be  absolutely  exact  is  the  science  of 
pure  mathematics.  When  you  come  to 
things  you  incur  at  once  an  unavoidable 
inexactitude.  We  do  not  estimate  the  mean 
distance  of  the  earth  from  the  sun  in  frac- 
tions of  an  inch.  In  the  simply  physical 
sciences  the  amount  of  unavoidable  inex- 
actitude is  relatively  small ;  in  the  biological 
sciences  it  is  relatively  great.  When  you 
come  to  consider  the  question  of  the  develop- 
ment in  the  past  of  a  particular  species  of 
animal,  and  of  how  it  comes  to  live  at  present 
where  it  does  live,  your  answers  to  these 
questions  may  be  very  significant  and  in- 
teresting and  even  quite  true  so  far  as  they 
go,  but  they  make  no  pretence  of  being  exact, 
and  can  never  possibly  become  so.  And 
there  can  be  no  doubt  that  in  historical 
science  we  shall  have  to  content  ourselves 
with  still  rougher  approximations  to  truth 
than  can  be  attained  in  the  higher  branches 
of  biology  proper.  A  good  deal  of  current 
objection    to    historical   science   is   based   on 


28     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

nothing  better  than  quite  unreasonable  de- 
mands, associated  with  an  erroneous  notion 
of  the  exactness  of  science  in  general. 

To  return  to  the  fundamental  difficulty 
that  has  been  stated.  At  the  outset  the 
would-be  scientific  historian  is  met  by  the 
assertion  that  all  his  generalisations  as  to 
cause  will  be  wrong  because  they  must 
needs  concern  the  action  of  innumerable 
people,  while  he  really  does  not  know  why 
any  one  of  them  acted.  The  assertion  has 
a  formidable  appearance,  and  the  question 
is  not  how  far  it  is  true  but  how  far  it  is 
really  relevant.  For  it  is  undeniably  true. 
It  is  true  that  we  ourselves  constantly  act 
without  knowing  why.  It  is  true  that  we 
can  only  explain  in  a  crude  and  unsatisfac- 
tory manner  the  action  even  of  such  persons 
as  we  know  most  familiarly.  We  find  it 
easier  to  account  to  ourselves  for  the  con- 
duct of  a  man  of  whom  we  know  little  than 
for  that  of  a  man  we  know  well.  It  is  true 
that  we  can  never  give  such  an  account  of 


Certain  Radical  Objections.       29 

the  action  of  our  friends  and  acquaintance 
as  Paul  Bourget,  for  instance,  gives  of  the 
conduct  of  his  imaginary  people.  But  it  is 
also  true  that  for  the  purposes  of  historical 
science  we  do  not  want  any  such  account. 
Even  though  it  be  true  that  the  subject- 
matter  of  history  is  entirely  made  up  of  the 
inexplicable  actions  of  mysterious  individual 
beings,  it  is  also  true  that  we  do  not  re- 
quire explanations  of  the  conduct  of  any 
one  individual. 

However  complex  human  motive  and  the 
cause  of  human  action  may  be  in  any  par- 
ticular case,  we  shall  nevertheless  find,  when 
we  come  to  classify  motives,  that  they  fall 
under  comparatively  few  distinct  classes. 
It  is  not  the  motive  that  varies  infinitely, 
but  the  constitution  of  the  individual  mind. 
Though  we  cannot  quantitatively  estimate 
the  value  of  any  given  motive  in  any  par- 
ticular case,  yet  when  we  find  a  large 
number  of  people  doing  about  the  same 
thing   under   similar    circumstances,    we    can 


30     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

certainly  infer  something  as  to  the  quality 
and  make-up  of  their  minds,  and  something 
further  as  to  the  motive  that  is  dominant 
in  the  mass  of  them.  If  in  two  cases,  the 
circumstances  being  nearly  the  same,  two 
people  act  in  nearly  the  same  way,  the  mere 
fact  goes  for  nothing.  They  may  not  have 
a  single  motive  in  common.  Even  though 
they  have  at  least  one  motive  in  common, 
the  dominant  motive  may  be  different  in 
the  two  cases.  But  if  instead  of  two  we 
have  a  thousand,  then  any  motive  they  have 
in  common  is  probably  the  dominant  motive 
with  the  mass  of  them ;  and  if  we  have  a 
million  this  probability  is  far  higher  still. 
In  this  way  we  may  establish  with  tolerable 
certainty  the  fact  of  a  dominant  motive  in 
a  mass  of  people,  even  though  we  cannot  be 
sure  that  it  is  dominant  in  any  particular 
one  of  them. 

Really,  of  course,  things  are  by  no  means 
so  simple.  Instead  of  one  dominant  motive 
there  may  well  be  several  practically  equally 


Certain  Radical  Objections.      31 

effective.  Moreover,  what  we  call  motives 
are  in  general  not  simple  but  rather  very 
complex  things.  Again,  the  assertion  of  any 
motive  not  of  the  very  simplest  order  in- 
volves an  assertion  about  the  nature  of  the 
mind  it,  as  we  say,  acts  upon.  But  all  this 
does  not  affect  the  argument.  What  it  is 
necessary  to  insist  upon  is  simply  this, 
that  we  can  make  positive  and  approxi- 
mately correct  inferences  as  to  the  causes 
of  the  action  of  masses  of  people  without 
being  able  to  be  sure  about  the  action  of 
any  one  of  them.  The  fact  may  be  re- 
garded as  obvious.  Obvious  or  not,  it  is 
just  on  this  fact  that  the  whole  science  of 
history,  which  deals  and  can  only  deal  with 
masses,  depends.  Once  we  have  found  a 
way  of  dealing  with  the  action  of  masses, 
objections  to  historical  science  founded  on 
our  inability  to  interpret  individual  action 
fall  to  the  ground.  It  is  of  no  use  for  the 
objecter  to  say  that  every  individual  in  the 
mass    is    as    mysterious    as   Napoleon.     That 


32     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

fact  no  longer  concerns  us.  Any  individual 
whom  we  can  merge  into  the  mass  no  longer 
concerns  us  as  such. 

But  we  have  still  to  find  a  way  of  deal- 
ing with  those  individuals  who  obstinately 
insist  on  being  treated  separately.  The  ob- 
jection recurs  in  the  form  in  which  we  first 
stated  it.  We  have  still  to  deal  with  our 
technically  "  great "  people.  If  it  be  possible 
to  find  dominant  motives  for  the  action  of 
masses,  this  does  not  enable  us  to  explain 
the  action  of  any  individual.  And  we  have 
to  consider  the  cases  of  individuals  whose 
action  as  such  has  distinctly  traceable  re- 
sults, and  who  cannot,  therefore,  be  wholly 
merged  in  the  mass. 

The  question  is  just  this :  how  far  can 
the  great  man,  king,  conqueror,  discoverer, 
or  what  not,  be  merged  in  the  mass?  We 
have  here  a  mind  which,  owing  either  to  its 
native  power  or  to  its  place  in  society,  exer- 
cises some  degree  of  control  over  the  course 
things  take.     We  cannot  explain  the  action 


Certain  Radical  Objections.      33 

of  this  mind  otherwise  than  very  crudely. 
How  are  we  to  merge  it  ideally  with  the 
masses  on  which  it  acts  so  that  our  general- 
isations concerning  them  will  include  its 
action  ? 

It  will  certainly  not  help  us  much  to  talk 
vaguely  of  the  great  man  as  a  product  of 
his  time.  At  best  the  phrase  expresses  a 
half-truth  only.  The  great  man  is  produced 
in  the  first  place  by  his  parents ;  and  they 
are  products  of  their  time  rather  than  of  his. 
The  great  man's  great-grandfather  may  have 
been  a  very  important  factor  in  his  making. 
At  bottom  the  great  man,  like  all  the  rest 
of  us,  is  the  product  not  of  his  own  time  but 
of  all  time.  We  are  safer  when  we  speak  of 
the  great  man  as  conditioned  by  his  time, 
though  the  phrase  is  dangerously  near  a 
truism.  But  it  means  at  least  this,  that  the 
notions  and  aims  of  the  great  man,  being 
formed  by  the  action  of  his  surroundings 
on  his  mind,  must  needs  be  in  some  degree 
representative  of  the  aims  and  notions  of  a 

c 


34     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

number  of  his  contemporaries  and  even  in  some 
degree  of  all  people  of  his  time  and  place. 
There  is  something  helpful  in  this  considera- 
tion, though  not,  perhaps,  very  much.  For 
we  have  also  to  consider  that  the  mind  of 
the  great  man  might  be  equally  representative 
and  yet  very  different  from  what  it  is.  And, 
moreover,  just  where  it  is  most  original  it  is 
least  representative. 

However,  it  is  not  only  the  mind  of  the 
great  man,  it  is  also  his  action  that  is  circum- 
stantially conditioned.  The  effectiveness  of 
his  action  will  depend  upon  the  degree  of 
correspondence  between  his  mind  and  the 
mind  of  the  masses  he  acts  upon.  It  is  just 
the  coincidence  between  his  action  and  the 
desires,  sentiments,  habits,  and  dreams  of 
the  masses  that  give  it  its  effectiveness. 
Technically  absolute  monarch  though  he  be, 
there  is  nothing  at  all  absolute  about  his 
power.  He  can  only  act  on  and  through 
other  minds.  He  can,  perhaps,  act  on  bodies 
also  and  hang  people  who  differ ;   but  to  do 


Certain  Radical  Objections.      35 

so  he  must  find  hangmen.  It  remains  true 
under  all  conditions  that  the  great  man  can 
only  act  through  other  minds ;  so  that  if 
we  understand  the  mass  we  understand  a 
good  deal  about  the  action  of  our  great  man. 
We  know  or  may  know  what  he  cannot  do, 
and  we  also  know,  at  least  in  some  degree, 
what  he  must  do. 

Nor  need  we  admit  that  of  the  personal 
idiosyncrasy  of  the  great  man  we  can  under- 
stand nothing.  If  we  cannot  hope  adequately 
to  explain  his  psychology  and  his  constitution 
and  say  what  part  his  grand -parents  and 
what  part  his  digestive  apparatus  played  in 
his  policy,  we  can,  perhaps,  roughly  approxi- 
mate to  the  truth  even  with  regard  to  these 
matters.  It  is  certainly  not  true  that  our 
great  man  is  an  absolutely  incomprehensible 
being.     He  is,  after  all,  very  like  ourselves. 

All  this  trouble  about  great  men  is  really 
only  part  of  a  much  larger  trouble  about  what 
we  can  only  call  accident.  In  our  personal 
lives  we  call  anything  accidental  that  happens 


36     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

from   causes   altogether   beyond  our  control. 
If  I  am  climbing  on  a  mountain  and  my  foot 
slips,  that  is  not  accident  but  my  own  doing ; 
but  if  a  stone  comes  down  on  me  from  above, 
that,    from    my   point   of  view,    is   accident. 
In  the  same  sense  human  history  is  full  of 
accidents  which  produce  more  or  less  serious 
results.    From  the  historian's  point  of  view 
everything   is    accidental    which,    happening 
from  causes  lying  outside  his  range  of  inves- 
tigation,   yet    produces    results    within    that 
range.     The   results   of  the   action   of  great 
men  as  such  are  of  this  nature.     Just  so  far 
as    results    are   due    to    the   idiosyncrasy   of 
some   powerful    person    they   are    accidental. 
And  what  of  the  great  man  himself?     How 
came  he  there  at  all  ?     He  is  a  mere  accident. 
What   if  Cromwell   had   been   killed    in    his 
first    fight?     What    if    Napoleon    had    been 
picked  up  by  an  English  frigate  as  he  crossed 
from  Acre  in  1799  ?     It  would  be  ludicrously 
absurd  to  say  that  such  things  do  not  happen. 
There  is  no  sort  of  reason  why  they  should 
not  happen,   and  therefore,  in  the  long-run, 


Certain  Radical  Objections.      37 

they  do.  The  story  of  man's  life  must  be  full 
of  unknown  accidents.  And  anyhow,  how 
came  the  great  man  to  be  there  at  all  ?  It 
is  useless  to  try  to  evade  the  difficulty  by 
saying  that  the  crisis  produces  the  man. 
A  crisis  no  doubt  tends  to  produce  a  man  : 
it  certainly  does  not  produce  the  man. 

But  the  great  man  is  only  one  of  the 
instruments  of  the  great  goddess,  Chance. 
Weather,  as  distinguished  from  climate,  has 
played  a  not  inconsiderable  part  in  human 
affairs.  How  were  the  results  of  the  Thirty 
Years'  War  affected  by  the  interference  of 
fog  on  the  battlefield  of  Lutzen  ?  But  the 
grandest  instance  known  to  us  of  the 
possible  effects  of  weather  is  to  be  found  in 
the  great  French  Revolution.  It  cannot  be 
doubted  that  the  course  of  events  in  France 
would  have  been  very  different  from  what 
it  was  but  for  the  terrible  winter  of  1788-89 
which  immediately  produced  the  great  famine 
of  the  latter  year.  It  may  fairly  be  argued 
that  had  that  winter  and  spring  been  normal 
there  would  have  been  no  Reign  of  Terror 


38     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

and  no  chance  for  Napoleon.  There  would 
have  been  a  revolution  of  some  sort,  no 
doubt :  how  different  a  revolution  no  one 
can  say. 

Again  there  are  many  kinds  of  coincidence, 
and  the  arm  of  coincidence  is  very  long. 
It  would  be  easy  to  multiply  instances. 
Consider  what  happened  in  France  during 
the  so-called  wars  of  religion.  Great  part 
of  Southern  France  seemed  to  be  breaking 
away  from  the  rest  of  the  country.  The 
Huguenot  provinces  were  organising  them- 
selves more  and  more  completely  into  the 
form  of  an  independent  state.  Already 
they  were  making  treaties  with  the  Crown 
as  with  a  strange  power.  A  declaration 
of  independence  seemed  coming.  It  looked 
as  though  there  would  either  be  formed 
in  South  France  a  new  kingdom  under  the 
King  of  Navarre  or  some  such  federal  re- 
public as  that  of  the  Swiss.  But  a  series 
of  accidents,  occurring  just  in  time,  made 
the  King  of  Navarre  himself  heir  of  the 
crown  of  France.      Yet  Henry  II.  and  Cath- 


Certain  Radical  Objections.       39 

erine  de  Medicis  had  left  four  sons.  Every 
one  of  them  died  childless :  and  if  any 
one  of  them  had  had  a  son,  or  even  a 
daughter,  the  history  of  France  would  have 
been  changed,  no  one  can  say  how  much. 

So,  in  conclusion,  do  the  best  that  we 
may  with  these  fundamental  objections  to 
the  attempt  to  make  a  science  of  history, 
we  have,  after  all,  to  make  certain  serious 
admissions.  There  is  a  considerable  element 
of  accident  in  human  history  which  defies 
generalisation  and  is  a  cause  of  inexactitude 
in  all  generalisations.  The  wider  our  general- 
isation is  and  the  more  centuries  it  covers, 
the  less  the  amount  of  error  from  this  cause 
will  be.  But  we  cannot  hope  to  escape  it 
altogether.  All  we  can  do  is  to  state  it 
where  we  can  see  it  and  allow  discount  for 
it  everywhere.  It  remains  true  that  so 
long  as  we  can  deal  reasonably  with  the 
action  of  masses  we  have  a  good  basis  for 
a  scientific  treatment  of  history.  For,  after 
all,  however  large  the  amount  of  accident 
exactly    may    be,    it    is    demonstrable     that 


40     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

accident  accounts  for  only  a  small  percentage 
of  the  total.  But  it  must  not  be  forgotten 
that  the  explanation  of  the  action  of  masses 
by  reference  to  dominant  motives  involves 
a  margin  of  error  there  also. 


4i 


IV. 

CERTAIN  PRACTICAL  INFERENCES. 

The  implications  of  a  thing  are  part  of 
the  thing.  What  we  have  now  to  do  is  to 
draw  certain  practically  important  inferences 
from  our  theory  of  scientific  history. 

It  is  the  scientific  historian  whom  alone, 
for  the  present,  we  have  to  consider.  He 
is  concerned  essentially  and  almost  all  the 
time  with  problems  of  causation.  He 
must,  of  course,  ascertain  how  things  were 
superficially  before  he  can  even  ask  any 
question.  But  there  are  very  many  facts 
and  aspects  of  fact  with  which  he  is  not 
concerned  at  all.  He  needs  facts  only  to 
explain  other  facts.  What  he  is  looking  for 
is  real  relations,  that  is,  causal  relations.  If 
he   can  find  these  he  wants  no  more :  if  he 


42     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

cannot  find  these  he  has  found  nothing.  A 
fact  is  only  important  to  him  because  of  its 
bearing  upon  something  else.  An  event 
is  only  important  so  far  as  it  has  results, 
and  the  results  of  an  event  are,  to  him,  an 
absolute  measure  of  its  importance.  Every- 
thing to  him  is  result  first  and  cause  after- 
wards, and  so  far  as  it  is  not  cause  it  is 
unimportant. 

If  we  were  dealing,  from  the  scientific 
point  of  view,  with  the  battle  of  Blenheim, 
we  should  not  want  to  know  how  the  Duke 
of  Marlborough  felt  about  it.  It  is  not  a 
question  of  not  being  able  to  find  this  out : 
we  do  not  need  to  find  it  out.  It  might 
or  it  might  not  interest  us  to  know ;  but 
we  must  not  be  misled  into  supposing  that 
things  which  interest  us  are,  as  such,  of  any 
importance  whatever.  It  is  a  common  fail- 
ing among  historians  to  run  off  after  some 
point  which  happens  to  interest  them,  but 
which  is  quite  irrelevant  to  the  matter  in 
hand.  This  is  a  form  of  egotism  which 
should   be  suppressed.     We  want  to  explain 


Certain  Practical  Inferences.     43 

why  the  battle  of  Blenheim  went  as  it  did, 
but  we  do  not  want  to  build  up  a  picture 
of  Marlborough's  mind  by  an  imaginative 
process,  the  results  of  which  are  both  un- 
certain and  irrelevant.  The  great  man  must 
be  to  us  a  factor  and  nothing  more  ;  unless, 
indeed,  we  regard  him  as  a  nuisance,  bring- 
ing an  element  of  accident  into  otherwise 
intelligible  sequences.  We  may  have  to 
seek  to  explain  his  acts,  but  we  are  not 
concerned  with  the  quality  of  them.  It  does 
not  matter  to  us  whether  he  is  what  is 
called  a  hero  or  what  is  called  a  blackguard. 
Discussion  on  the  point  is  as  useless  as  re- 
search directed  to  finding  out  whether  his 
eyes  were  blue  or  green.  We  shall  ask  no 
more  questions  about  our  great  man  than  we 
are  compelled  to  ask ;  and  it  is  a  nuisance 
to  have  to  ask  any  at  all. 

The  inference  maj^  be  put  more  broadly, 
in  the  form  of  two  propositions,  not  quite 
strictly  separable.  In  the  first  place,  the 
scientific  historian  has  no  business  with  the 
dramatic  or  the  picturesque  or  the  tragic  or 


44     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

the  comic  or  the  pathetic.  The  life  of  man 
is  full  of  these  things, — so  full  that  you  can 
find  one  or  other  or  perhaps  all  of  them 
almost  everywhere.  At  first  sight  it  might 
seem  a  paradox  to  say  that  the  historian  is 
not  to  deal  with  them.  But  from  the  point 
of  view  of  the  scientific  historian  these 
things,  or  rather  these  aspects  of  things,  are 
irrelevant,  if  they  can  be  said  to  exist  at 
all.  It  will  not,  indeed,  do  to  say  that  they 
exist  only  to  the  mind  that  sees  them.  That 
would  be  to  put  the  matter  too  broadly,  and 
lay  oneself  open  to  the  retort  that  we  do 
not  know  that  anything  exists  except  to  the 
perceiving  mind.  But  we  may  put  it  thus. 
There  are  things  and  relations  that  exist  to 
the  intellect  as  such,  to  the  intellect  un- 
alloyed; and  these  are  the  things  with 
which  science  deals.  And  there  are  other 
things  and  relations  that  do  not  exist  at  all 
to  the  mere  intelligence,  and  with  such 
things  science  cannot  deal  directly.  The 
tragic  and  the  picturesque  and  so  on  are 
among  these.     When   we   say   that   a   thing 


Certain  Practical  Inferences.     45 

is  tragic  or  comic  we  express  not  only  how 
we  see  it,  but  also  how  we  feel  it,  and  we 
are,  therefore,  expressing  something  irrele- 
vant to  the  purposes  of  a  student  of  causa- 
tion. One  may  put  it,  perhaps,  more  simply. 
The  tragic  is  an  aspect  of  things,  the  comic 
is  another ;  but  neither  has  any  real  relation 
except  to  the  mind  that  sees  it.  They  are 
not  causal.  The  revulsion  of  feeling,  the 
horror  of  his  deed,  the  sense  that  he  has 
already  destroyed  his  best  part  of  life, 
which  make  Othello  stab  himself,  these  are 
causal  things  ;  but  they  are  not  the  tragedy 
of  Othello.  It  may  well  be  difficult  for  the 
most  scientific  of  historians  to  avoid  laugh- 
ing or  crying  occasionally,  but  his  laughter 
and  his  tears  are  alike  irrelevant.  And  so 
with  other  such  aspects  of  life.  When  the 
historian  narrates  for  the  sake  of  telling 
a  good  story,  when  he  takes  pains  to  bring 
out  the  picturesque  character  of  one  inci- 
dent, the  ironic  quality  of  another,  it 
matters  not  how  well  he  does  these  things, 
he  is  simply  off  the  point.     The  blue  pencil 


46     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

of  the  scientific  historian  would  be  run  right 
through  almost  all  the  purple  passages  of 
our  histories. 

We  come  to  our  second  proposition,  perhaps 
more  important,  certainly  more  disputable ; 
for  no  one  can  dispute  the  irrelevance  of 
the  picturesque  to  scientific  history.  It  is 
this :  that  any  kind  of  moralising  and  every 
kind  of  moral  judgment  is  also  irrelevant. 
There  are,  roughly,  two  sorts  of  moralising 
that  one  commonly  meets  with  in  historical 
writings.  There  is  discussion  about  the 
moral  quality  of  a  man  and  his  acts,  or, 
which  is  nearly  the  same  thing,  about  the 
morality  of  the  action  of  a  mass,  a  party 
policy,  or  a  law,  and  there  is  the  pure 
gnomic  element,  consisting  of  statements  of 
general  moral  consequence,  inferred  from  or 
suggested  by  things  under  discussion.  We 
must  distinguish,  to  some  extent,  between 
these  two.     There  are  degrees  of  irrelevancy. 

When,  at  the  end  of  one  of  Mrs  Mark- 
ham's  chapters,  little  Alice  or  little  Henry 
asks   his   mother,    "Was  Henry   II.    a  good 


Certain  Practical  Inferences.     47 

man  or  a  bad  man,  mamma?"  we  are  in- 
clined to  laugh.  Laugh  by  all  means ;  but 
not  only  at  Mrs  Markham.  Laugh,  also, 
at  all  the  much  more  pretentious  people 
who  solemnly  engage  in  similar  discussions. 
In  the  given  case  we  laugh,  perhaps,  only 
at  the  implied  assumption  that  Henry  of 
Anjou  can  be  classed  definitely  as  good 
or  bad.  There  is  much  more  than  that 
to  laugh  at.  It  is  not  a  good  question 
crudely  put.  Are  we  going  to  analyse 
the  elements  of  goodness  and  badness  in 
Henry,  establish  degrees  and  sum  him  up 
as  not  black  or  white  but  a  kind  of 
greenish -grey?  A  goodly  task  we  have 
set  ourselves,  and  a  pretty  tangle  we  are 
thrusting  ourselves  into  to  no  purpose !  To 
no  purpose :  we  might  be  content  with 
that.  In  what  way  will  our  summing  up 
of  Henry's  moral  qualities  affect  our  esti- 
mate of  him  as  a  factor  in  change  ?  It  is 
a  clear  case  of  digression.  But  one  is  in- 
clined to  carry  the  war  a  little  way  into 
the    enemies'    country.      These   moral    judg- 


48     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

ments  raise  all  kinds  of  questions,  and  an 
historian  who  wishes  to  indulge  in  them 
should  explain  his  system  of  ethics.  How 
does  he  know  that  what1  he  calls  bad  his 
readers  do  not  call  good? 

What  right  has  he  to  try  Henry  by  his 
twentieth -century  notions  of  good  and  bad, 
and  impose  those  same  notions  on  us  ?  We 
will  move  the  previous  question  and  ask 
what  he  means  by  good.  Or  is  he  an 
impressionist  merely,  frankly  saying,  "This 
strikes  me  as  ugly  and  unpleasant,  and 
that,  on  the  contrary,  as  quite  nice "  ?  Our 
answer  may  well  be  that  we  do  not  care 
at  all  how  things  strike  him. 

But  is  he  setting  about  to  try  Henry  by 
Henry's  own  standards?  Is  he  going  to 
appeal  against  Henry  or  to  justify  him 
by  Henry's  own  conscience  ?  A  distinction 
must  be  made  here.  There  is  something 
to  be  said  for  a  curious  inquiry  of  this 
kind.  If  we  could  really  get  at  the  con- 
science of  a  twelfth -century  man  we  might 
find    it    the    key    to    a    good    many    things. 


Certain  Practical  Inferences.     49 

Henry  of  Anjou  was  a  prominent  person, 
and  a  good  deal  is  known  about  him.  The 
inquiry  as  to  what  his  moral  consciousness 
was  like  is  worth  making,  if  we  see  any 
hope  of  an  answer,  just  -because  and  only 
because  it  might  prove  to  be  a  key  to 
other  matters.  Nevertheless,  that  further 
question — how  far  was  Henry  justified  by 
his  own  moral  consciousness  ? — is  entirely 
irrelevant.  If  we  make  an  inquiry  with 
a  view  to  a  judgment  on  that  question, 
we  are  missing  the  point.  Yet  it  may  be 
better  that  the  inquiry  should  be  made  in 
that  way  than  not  made  at  all. 

To  questions  concerning  the  morality  of 
the  acts  of  political  parties  or  of  nations 
the  same  considerations  apply.  The  moral 
consciousness  of  a  nation  is  a  fact  very 
important  to  define ;  but  we  have  no 
business  with  casuistry.  But  as  to  the 
gnomic  element  in  historical  writing,  from 
the  scientific  point  of  view  there  is  nothing 
at  all  to  be  said  for  it  in  any  case.  When 
an  historian  describes  the  fall  of  some  great 

D 


50     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

personage  and  then  adds  remarks  about  the 
instability  of  human  grandeur,  he  is  not 
merely  delivering  solemn  truisms,  he  is 
also  wasting  his  time.  The  fact  that  he 
sometimes  does  this  sort  of  thing,  as  Carlyle 
did,  in  a  brilliant  and  impressive  manner, 
is  neither  here  nor  there. 

An  average  Englishman  is  still  a  moralis- 
ing animal,  though,  perhaps,  not  quite  so 
much  so  as  he  was  a  few  years  back. 
When  an  English  historian  indulges  in 
moral  judgments  or  points  a  little  moral 
lesson,  he  is  enjoying  himself,  one  might 
say,  in  a  harmless  fashion  after  all.  More- 
over, if  his  moralising  runs  to  any  serious 
length,  it  can  always  be  skipped.  But 
this  lenient  view  of  the  case  is  only 
partially  just.  This  habit  of  moralising 
encourages  a  popular  belief  that  it  is  the 
historian's  business  to  moralise.  Not  long 
ago  a  lady  asked  the  present  writer  whether 
he  regarded  Henry  of  Navarre  as  a  hero. 
She  evidently  thought  him  professionally 
bound   to  have  an  opinion    on    this  obscure 


Certain  Practical  Inferences.     51 

point.  It  proved  quite  useless  to  tell  her 
that  he  did  not,  in  any  sense,  specialise  in 
heroism.  The  distinction  was  not  appre- 
hended. 

In  truth  there  are  radical  objections  to 
all  this  moralising.  It  involves  assump- 
tions about  ethics ;  it  often  involves  some 
degree  of  self-deception;  and  it  sometimes 
involves  cant.  This  last  case  arises  when 
the  historian  poses  as  being  very  painfully 
shocked  at  very  ordinary  misconduct.  It 
is  astonishing  to  think  what  virtuous  people 
historians  must  be,  if  you  take  them  to 
mean  all  they  imply.  If  I  simply  condemn, 
in  some  sense,  Charles  II. 's  or  William  III.'s 
profligacy,  or  Elizabeth's  lying,  I  am  merely 
doing  something  quite  superfluous,  I  am 
not  making  any  claim  to  virtue.  But  if 
I  profess  to  regard  these  things  with  any 
extreme  horror,  that  certainly  does  seem  to 
imply  an  uncommon  degree  of  virtuous 
sensitiveness.  And  if  I  profess  to  be  not 
merely  disgusted  but  positively  surprised 
at  such  iniquities,  that  implies  an  almost  in- 


52     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

credible  innocence  on  my  part.  And  there 
is  only  this  to  add :  that  such  a  degree  of 
innocence  is  highly  undesirable  in  an  his- 
torian, whatever  it  may  be  in  other  people. 

So  far  as  the  conduct  of  a  great  man  pro- 
duces moral  reaction  at  the  time — so  far  as 
people  of  his  own  time  are  disgusted  or 
moved  to  admiration  by  the  moral  aspect 
of  his  proceedings — this  moral  aspect  has, 
of  course,  to  be  considered  as  a  factor.  But 
conscience  and  all  its  attendant  phenomena 
must  be  for  the  scientific  historian  a  result 
simply  and  simply  a  cause.  We  have  to 
examine  people's  moral  ideas  because  these 
ideas  more  or  less  affect  their  conduct.  We 
have  to  treat  the  moral  consciousness  of  any 
particular  time  and  place  as  a  product  and 
try  to  explain  it. 

The  tendency  to  sit  in  judgment  from  a 
point  of  view  at  once  ethical  and  modern 
is  only  part  of  a  much  wider  tendency  to 
test  the  past  by  the  touchstone  of  our 
feelings.  The  ethical  judgment  delivered 
from   modern   standpoints    is    so   completely 


Certain  Practical  Inferences.     53 

irrelevant  to  the  purpose  of  scientific  history 
that  it  does  little  or  no  direct  harm.  An 
historian  may  amuse  himself  in  this  way 
without  distorting  facts  or  confusing  his 
ideas  of  what  happened.  He  may  be,  as  we 
say,  impartial  in  his  ethical  deliverances ;  and 
in  that  case  they  are  no  worse  than  useless 
digressions.  But  there  are  greater  dangers. 
When  a  man  sets  out  to  travel  in  past 
time  many  pitfalls  beset  the  way  of  his 
understanding.  He  is  apt  to  attribute  the 
ideas  with  which  he  is  most  familiar  to  the 
people  he  meets.  He  is  apt  to  interpret 
their  actions  by  reference  to  ideas  which 
exist  in  his  mind  but  never  existed  in 
theirs.  He  is  apt  to  find  his  Bill  of  Rights 
or  his  Habeas  Corpus  Act  in  their  Great 
Charter.  He  tends  to  set  up  his  own  stand- 
ard of  values  for  the  old  states  and  the  old 
races.  When  he  meets  with  a  movement 
which  seems  in  some  degree  analogous  to 
some  present  -  day  movement  with  which 
he  sympathises,  he  is  apt  to  think  of  it  as 
a  proper,   progressive  sort   of   thing,   and   of 


54     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

its  opponents  as  obstructionists  in  some 
large  sense.  He  is  apt  to  make  of  his  own 
mind  a  touchstone  of  progress,  to  think  of 
movement  in  the  direction  or  along  the  line 
of  his  own  opinions  as  to  what  is  good,  as 
advance,  not  merely  in  time.  The  human 
mind  is  the  victim  of  a  strong  tendency  to 
regard  itself  as  infallible.  It  easily  becomes 
the  victim  of  many  kinds  of  bias, — of  class 
bias,  or  of  patriotic  bias,  or  of  political  bias. 
Perhaps  the  most  virulent  of  all  these  poisons 
is  the  political  bias.  The  historians  are  per- 
haps few  who,  instead  of  approaching  modern 
politics  through  history,  have  approached 
history  through  modern  politics.  But  their 
followers  are  many.  It  is  not  necessary  to 
deal  here  with  the  crudest  forms  of  this  evil, 
though  even  these  are  common,  if  one  judges 
by  the  utterances  of  professional  politicians. 
But  then  professional  politicians  will  say 
anything,  and  one  never  knows.  .  .  .  Any- 
how there  is  a  strong  tendency  among  those 
afflicted  with  the  bias  of  party  politics  to 
take   sides   in   the   past   as   they   do   in    the 


Certain  Practical  Inferences.     55 

present,  and  to  condemn  proceedings  which 
run  counter  to  their  notions  and  to  applaud 
the  contrary  things.  Such  people  are  apt 
to  see  in  the  past  a  progressive  development 
of  their  own  principles  of  action.  They  set 
up  their  own  ideas  as  standards  of  progress, 
and  close  their  eyes  firmly  to  the  fact  that 
these  ideas  have  little  or  no  real  relation  to 
the  past  at  all.  They  mislead  themselves 
with  shadowy  analogies  and  fail  to  see  what 
is  vital  by  looking  for  something  else.  The 
angry  holding  of  decided  party  views  about 
the  politics  of  to-day  is  not,  perhaps,  an 
absolute  disqualification  for  understanding 
history.  But  indubitably  such  views  involve 
a  very  serious  danger.  The  point  of  view 
of  people  of  past  centuries  is  always  hard  to 
realise.  But  it  must  be  got  at,  and  great 
pains  and  patience  are  commonly  required. 
The  one  fatal  procedure  is  procedure  on  an 
assumption  that  it  was  a  point  of  view  at  all 
closely  corresponding  with  any  with  which 
we  are  familiar. 

The  attempt  to  find   our  party  politics  in 


56     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

the  past,  or  to  read  our  conceptions  into  the 
mind  of  the  thirteenth  century,  is  so  hopeless 
that  it  cannot  coexist  with  any  serious  study 
of  history  at  all.  But  apart  from  such 
crudities  there  is  more  subtle  danger.  The 
tendency  to  regard  the  past  as  though  it 
led  up  to  the  present  and  then  stopped  is 
strong  and  prevalent  and  radically  distort- 
ing. It  leads  people  to  think  of  such  move- 
ments as  directly  point  to  the  present  state 
of  things  as  "advances":  and  contrariwise. 
"  Advances,"  of  course,  these  in  a  sense  are : 
advances  in  time  past  towards  a  condition 
existing  in  time  to  come.  But  the  most 
"  reactionary "  movement  is  an  advance  in 
this  sense.  The  people  who  labour  under 
the  illusion  of  which  we  speak  mean  more 
than  this  by  "  advance."  They  have  some 
theory  of  progress  for  the  nation  or  the  race, 
and  they  measure  advance  in  what  they  call 
progress  by  reference  to  present  conditions. 
Curiously  enough  the  tendency  to  think  in 
this  fashion  seems  to  exist  very  strongly  in 
people  who  do  not  regard  the  present  state 


Certain  Practical  Inferences.     57 

of  things  as  at  all  satisfactory.  We  may 
hear  the  same  man  sweepingly  condemn  our 
present  social  and  legal  system,  and  a  minute 
later  refer  to  some  past  movement  leading 
straight  in  our  direction  as  an  advance. 
There  would  appear  to  be  some  confusion 
in  such  cases.    .    .    . 

That  the  past  does  not  in  any  sense  cul- 
minate in  the  present  is  one  of  those  obvious 
facts  that  need  to  be  continually  re -stated. 
We  can  only  see  history  in  right  perspective 
against  the  vast  unknown  of  the  future.  As 
Professor  Bury  has  finely  said  :  "  We  must 
see  our  petty  periods  sub  specie  perennitatis." 
The  one  thing  certain  is  change,  and  the 
present  is  a  mere  notion,  a  theoretical  point. 
It  will  not  do  to  assume  any  theory  of  pro- 
gress. If  you  have  a  theory  of  progress, 
try,  by  all  means,  to  demonstrate  it  from 
the  facts  of  the  past.  If  you  have  no  dis- 
tinct theory,  it  is  better  to  put  the  word 
altogether  out  of  mind.  But  if  you  have 
a  theory,  it  is  one  which  the  scientific 
study   of  history    will  in    time   establish    or 


58     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

in  time  condemn.  Adopt  your  theory  as 
a  working  hypothesis  and  see  how  far  it 
will  carry  you.  Probably  in  a  short  time 
you  will  have  forgotten  it.  In  any  case, 
if  your  theory  is  not  mere  nonsense  it  is 
an  enormous  historical  generalisation.  It 
may  be  more  than  that ;  but  it  must  be 
that.  In  any  case,  to  try  to  make  of  our 
present  conditions  a  test  of  progress  in  the 
past  is  merely  silly.  All  progress  in  the 
past  must  relate  to  the  future.  We  none 
of  us  have  any  knowledge  of  what  that 
future  is  going  to  be.  What  we  should 
like  it  to  be  is  a  totally  irrelevant  matter. 
It  is  very  unlikely  to  be  that.  We  none 
of  us  know  that  our  European  civilisation 
has  not  already  entered  on  a  process  of 
secret  decay.  After  all,  there  is  one  big 
fact  that  we  know  about  all  earlier  civilisa- 
tions :  they  all  perished.  And  there  is  one 
thing  certain,  that  nothing  lasts.  Nothing 
at  all  lasts.  Even  the  most  fundamental 
things  change,  if  only  very  slowly. 

Thus    we    arrive    at   a   conception    of   the 


Certain  Practical  Inferences.     59 

virtue  supremely  necessary  to  the  scientific 
historian.  We  might  call  it  impartiality ; 
but  the  word  is  too  narrow  and  has  some- 
what evil  associations.  As  a  rule,  when 
people  speak  of  impartiality  in  a  historian 
they  are  thinking  of  his  moral  judgments. 
They  mean  that  when  he  comes  to  weigh 
up  a  great  personage,  he  makes  the  proper 
allowances,  he  is  sympathetic,  he  feels  no 
animus,  he  tries  to  judge  the  man  by  the 
man's  own  standards.  All  this  is  needless. 
If  indeed  the  historian  feels  a  strong  an- 
imus against  his  great  personage  he  will 
probably  misunderstand  his  action,  and  this 
may  lead  him  to  misunderstand  the  con- 
ditions under  which  he  acts,  and  in  that 
way  become  a  cause  of  serious  error.  But 
we  don't  want  his  moral  judgments  at  all, 
and,  partial  or  impartial,  they  are  equally 
irrelevant.  On  the  other  hand,  in  relation 
to  the  mass  movements  of  history  we  want 
something  more  than  is  expressed  by  the 
word  impartiality.  We  want  a  complete 
intellectual  detachment.     A  writer  who  feels 


60     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

a  strong  bias  for  or  against  Catholicism  or 
Protestantism  or  any  other  'ism,  or  for 
or  against  democracy  or  aristocracy,  is  no 
scientific  historian.  Not  only  ought  such 
bias  to  be  impossible  to  the  scientific  histor- 
ian, we  may  fairly  say  that  it  is  impossible. 
A  man  with  such  bias  has  not  and  cannot 
take  the  scientific  point  of  view  in  relation  to 
his  subject.  In  the  preface  to  his  work  on  the 
French  Revolution,  Taine  told  us  that  he 
intended  to  contemplate  the  phenomena  of 
that  time  as  a  man  may  contemplate  the 
metamorphosis  of  an  insect.  It  cannot  be 
said  that  Taine  succeeded  in  doing  this ; 
but  it  must  be  said  that  he  ought  to 
have  done  so.  To  the  scientific  historian 
the  dreams  of  humanity,  its  ideals,  its 
struggles  and  triumphs,  its  failures  and 
miseries,  must  be  products  and  causes ; 
political  parties,  whether  of  the  past  or  of  the 
present,  social  wrongs  and  social  questions, 
wars  and  revolutions,  heroes  and  prophets, 
must  be  products  and  causes ;  religion  and 
conscience    must    be    products    and    causes. 


Certain  Practical  Inferences.     61 

What  is  needed  is  an  intellectual  de- 
tachment so  complete  that  all  the  hopes 
of  humanity  fail  to  arouse  a  dominant 
emotion. 

Some  one  will  perhaps  ask,  how,  if  the 
historian's  detachment  is  so  complete,  he  is 
to  sympathise  at  all,  and  will  perhaps  say 
that  if  he  does  not  sympathise  with  any- 
thing he  will  understand  nothing.  There 
is  a  certain  difficulty  here.  We  can  only 
say  that  if  he  sympathises  it  must  be  with 
all  classes,  with  all  causes,  with  all  ideals, 
with  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men.  His 
sympathy  must  be  Shakespearian  in  breath 
and  highly  intellectualised.  Assuredly  he 
must  never  for  a  moment  be  governed  by 
emotion.  It  may  be  objected,  still,  that  we 
are  demanding  too  much  of  our  scientific 
historian,  who,  after  all,  is  to  be  human. 
But  it  must  be  remembered  that  we  do  not 
expect  any  one  man  to  do  anything  per- 
fectly. All  that  is  absolutely  needed  is 
that  a  number  of  men  should  take  the 
scientific  point   of   view   and  work  honestly 


62     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

from  it  as  far  as  they  can  go.  The  errors 
of  each  one  will  be  corrected  by  the  others. 
Very  little  history  has  yet  been  written 
strictly  from  this  point  of  view.  Certainly 
very  little  has  been  written  in  English. 
Our  English  historians  seem  generally  to 
be  unable  to  resist  the  temptation  to  be 
eloqueut  or  moral.  It  is  not  altogether 
their  fault.  It  seems  to  be  expected  of 
them  that  they  should  digress  in  these 
ways.  On  the  other  hand,  a  good  deal  has 
been  written  more  or  less  strictly  from  this 
point  of  view  upon  what  are  called  consti- 
tutional and  economic  history.  Those  sub- 
jects do  not  readily  lend  themselves  to 
dramatic  or  even  to  eloquent  treatment. 
Moreover,  a  really  great  amount  of  research 
has  been  and  is  being  done  quite  strictly 
from  this  point  of  view.  This  research  has 
for  its  main  purpose  the  helping  of  future 
generations  to  build  up  a  science  of  history. 
One  thing  is  certain  in  this  connection.  If 
history  is  regarded  as  a  science,  it  must  be 
regarded  as  a  science  yet  in   its  beginning. 


Certain  Practical  Inferences.     63 

Almost  all  our  generalisations,  almost  all 
our  theories,  are  at  present  tentative,  experi- 
mental. It  is  doubtful  if  there  be  a  single 
short  period  in  the  history  of  any  nation 
our  general  notions  of  which  will  not  be, 
more  or  less  completely,  transformed  in  time 
to  come.  We  are  making — perhaps  we  have 
made  —  the  first  rough  approximations  to 
historical  truth.  We  are  laying  foundations, 
and  even  these  will  probably  have  to  be 
altered.  We  suffer  already  from  an  indi- 
gestion of  facts :  and  there  are  many  more 
to  come.  We  are  only  at  the  commence- 
ment of  understanding. 


64 


AN   ILLUSTRATION. 

It  will  be  well  at  this  point  to  deal  with 
some  definite  historical  problem,  not  so  as 
to  give  a  solution  of  it,  but  so  as  to  make 
out  in  what  sort  of  way  the  scientific 
historian  will  try  to  solve  it,  and  what 
sort  of  solution  may  be  hoped  for.  As  an 
illustrative  problem,  in  this  sense,  we  may 
take  the  causes  of  the  commencement  of 
the  Hundred  Years'  War. 

On  a  superficial  view  of  the  facts  we  are 
likely  to  be  struck  at  once  by  Edward  III.'s 
claim  that  the  French  crown  belonged  by 
right  to  him.  AVith  the  moral,  which  in 
this  case  includes  the  legal,  character  of 
this  claim  we  have,  in  this  connection, 
nothing  to  do.     It  may  concern  us  to  know 


An  Illustration.  65 

how  far  Edward  or  his  people  or  his  allies 
believed  in  this  asserted  right :  it  cannot 
concern  us  to  know  how  far  they  were,  in 
some  philosophical  sense,  right  in  so  be- 
lieving. It  is  here  no  question  of  the 
character  of  the  moral  consciousness  of  the 
people  of  Edward  IIL's  time,  but  simply  of 
the  commencement  of  the  war ;  and  we 
must  further  consider  that  the  amount  of 
belief  in  the  claim  is  probably  not  a  matter 
of  primary  importance.  People  in  the  mass 
and  in  the  long-run  believe  what  they  find 
it  most  convenient  to  believe ;  and  analysis 
will  always  show  a  very  close  correspond- 
ence between  the  beliefs  of  a  mass  or  of 
a  class  of  people  and  what  they  conceive 
as  their  interests.  If,  then,  Edward  III. 
and  his  people  believed  in  the  justice  of 
the  claim,  they  probably  had  very  practical 
and  quite  unphilosophical  reasons  for  so  be- 
lieving. Their  belief  would  probably  prove 
to  be  a  mere  product  of  the  same  causes 
that,  on  the  English  side,  produce  the  war. 
The    supposition    that    Edward    III.    made 


66    Place  of  History  in  Education. 

war  from  a  sense  of  duty  to  his  own  claim 
and  in  the  interests  of  international  justice 
is  evidently  one  only  to  be  entertained  in 
the  last  resort.  Before  such  a  claim  as  his 
is  ordinarily  acted  on,  it  must  at  least  seem 
desirable  to  make  it  good  in  other  interests 
than  those  of  justice.  Even  if  we  are  to 
regard  the  accident  of  the  legal  claim  as 
a  real  cause  of  the  war,  we  must  still  ask 
why  it  was  acted  upon.  But,  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  there  are  features  in  this  case  which 
point  to  the  conclusion  that  the  claim  was 
an  afterthought,  and  rather  a  pretext  for 
and  an  act  of  war  than  a  reason  for  de- 
claring it.  If  not  by  the  homage  done  in 
1329,  at  least  by  the  convention  of  1331 
Edward  had  recognised  Philip  VI.  as  rightful 
King  of  France.  His  re -discovery  of  his 
own  claim  some  years  later  is  suspicious. 
Moreover,  even  after  Crecy,  Edward  III. 
never  did  the  only  thing  which  could  pos- 
sibly have  won  the  crown  of  France  for 
him  even  for  a  time :  he  never  made  any 
serious  attempt  on   Paris,  as   did   Henry  V. 


An  Illustration.  67 

On  the  whole,   therefore,  we   may  set  aside 
for  the  present  this  matter  of  the  claim. 

We  will  glance  superficially  over  the  facts 
which  appear  to  bear  on  the  question.     Ever 
since  Edward   I.  had  started  on  his  attempt 
to   conquer   Scotland    the   French   king    had 
been   giving   more   or  less   assistance  to  the 
Scots.      Edward    III.'s    own    efforts    in    the 
same    direction   had    been   frustrated   largely 
by  such  interference.     Now  this  French  in- 
tervention   in    Scotland    is    manifestly    con- 
nected  with   the  English    hold   on    Gascony, 
of  which  the  French  king  desired  possession. 
From  the  English  point  of  view  French   in- 
terference in  Scotland,  besides  being  annoy- 
ingly    obstructive   in    itself,    amounted   to    a 
diversion  under  cover   of  which  the  French 
king  might  and  did   attack  Gascony.      Two 
serious    attempts    to    conquer    Gascony    had 
been   made   by   the   French   in   Edward    I.'s 
time,  and  under  Edward  II.  the  French  had 
actually  possessed  themselves    of  large    part 
of  that  district.     The  policy  and  aim  of  the 
French  king  in  the  matter  were  plain  enough, 


68     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

and  in  this  policy  he  had  already  shown  con- 
siderable persistence.  Now  the  retention  of 
Gascony  was  practically  important  to  the 
English  because  of  the  importance  of  the 
Gascon  wine  trade.  This  trade,  and  also 
the  trade  between  England  and  Flanders, 
was,  moreover,  a  good  deal  disturbed  by 
French  piracy.  For  instance,  in  1327  a 
certain  Hugh  Sampson  states  in  a  peti- 
tion to  the  king  that  a  ship  of  his,  sailing 
from  Bordeaux  to  England,  had  been  seized 
off  the  Norman  coast  by  four  French  ships, 
and  that  the  Frenchmen  had  slain  his  crew 
and  carried  off  his  ship  with  140  tuns  of 
wine.  Such  petitions  from  distracted  mer- 
chants seem  to  have  been  common,  and  of 
redress  there  seems  never  to  have  been  any. 
This  kind  of  thing  had  certainly  been  going 
on  for  a  long  time,  but  no  doubt  it  in- 
creased as  trade  grew,  and  perhaps  it  in- 
creased as  a  result  of  the  wars  over  Gas- 
cony and  Scotland  in  Edward  I.'s  time. 
From  all  these  things  we  can  make  certain 
inferences.     All  this  unredeemed  wrong  and 


An  Illustration.  69 

loss  means  resentment  in  the  minds  of 
a  large  number  of  the  people  concerned. 
The  people  concerned  in  the  trade  are,  of 
course,  not  only  the  merchants,  but  also 
their  customers,  and  also  the  producers  on 
both  sides  of  the  sea, — for,  of  course,  Eng- 
land was  sending  stuff  to  Gascony  to  pay 
for  its  Gascon  wine.  Further,  these  Scottish 
and  Gascon  affairs  probably  give  rise  to  a 
similar  resentment  and  sense  of  injury  in 
the  mind  of  the  king,  though  we  cannot  be 
sure  of  that.  And  there  is  one  thing  more 
that  needs  mention.  The  French  kins  was 
endeavouring  to  get  a  hold  on  Flanders 
through  its  Count.  The  growing  English 
trade  in  Flanders  was  imperilled. 

These  facts  are  not  all  the  facts  bearing 
on  our  problem,  but  they  are  sufficient  for 
our  present  purpose.  We  have  not  ac- 
counted yet  for  the  commencement  of  the 
war,  but  we  have  some  material  with  which 
to  account  for  it.  We  cannot  say  simply 
that  under  these  circumstances  Edward  III. 
determined    upon    war;    determined    to    use 


70    Place  of  History  in  Education. 

such  sea  power  as  he  had,  and  to  buy 
support  abroad,  and  determined  further  to 
claim  the  French  crown,  partly  as  an  excuse 
for  going  to  war  at  all,  partly  to  define  his 
position  in  relation  to  Flanders,  partly  to  raise 
hopes  of  larger  spoil  among  his  allies,  partly, 
perhaps,  in  the  hope  of  dividing  the  French, 
and  partly  as  an  appeal  to  the  patriotic 
sentiment  of  the  English.  That  statement 
would  be  true  as  far  as  it  goes,  but  it  does 
not  go  far  enough.  It  indicates  probable 
causes,  but  does  not  definitely  assign  or  dis- 
tinguish among  them.  It  leaves  many  ques- 
tions open.  Was  Edward  thinking  chiefly 
of  Scotland,  chiefly  of  Gascony,  or  chiefly 
of  Flanders  ?  Did  he  really  wish  to  make 
conquests  in  France  altogether  apart  from 
Gascony  ?  Did  it  seem  to  him  that  the 
only  way  of  holding  Gascony  in  the  long- 
run  lay  in  greatly  reducing  the  power  of 
the  French  king,  and,  in  fact,  in  holding 
much  more  ?  How  far  was  Edward  moved 
by  vanity,  and  how  far  by  resentment? 
How  far  was   he    influenced   by  the  French 


An  Illustration.  71 

king's  enemy,  Robert  of  Artois  ?  How  far 
was  he  thinking  of  making  himself  popu- 
lar? How  far  was  he  merely  yielding  to  a 
popular  demand  that  something  should  be 
done  ? 

All  these  questions  must  be  answered  in 
some  way  before  we  can  really  know  why 
the  war  was  begun.  It  becomes  apparent 
already  that  our  knowledge  can  never  be 
exact.  Moreover,  just  so  far  as  we  are 
driven  to  seek  the  cause  of  war  in  the  mind 
of  Edward  III.  we  are  in  great  difficulties. 
We  cannot  get  directly  at  that  mind.  Ques- 
tions quite  intimately  concerning  Edward 
himself  are  all,  more  or  less  completely, 
unanswerable.  Even  if  we  could  get  directly 
at  his  mind  it  would  not  help  us  much. 
Just  so  far  as  the  beginning  of  war  was  due 
to  mere  idiosyncrasies  of  Edward,  it  is  of 
the  nature  of  accident. 

How  far  can  we,  on  the  facts,  escape  an 
unwelcome  conclusion  of  this  kind?  We 
must  try  to  escape  it,  but  we  must  also  be 
prepared   to    accept    it.     We    shall   certainly 


72     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

reason  badly  if  we  set  out  with  a  rigid  re- 
solve to  refuse  any  such  conclusion. 

Let   us  try  if  it  be  possible  to  eliminate 
the   king  altogether.     Can  we   say  that  the 
root    of  the    whole    matter    is    the    political 
hold  of  the  English  on   Gascony?     This  an- 
tagonises  the  French  king;   it  leads  to  the 
French  interference  in   Scotland,   it   sets   up 
resentment    and    uneasiness,    it   leads   to    an 
aggravation  of  the  prevailing  friction  on  the 
coasts ;  finally,  it  brings  the  English  king  to 
a   merely    inevitable    conclusion    that    some- 
thing   vigorous    must    be    done    to    secure 
Gascony  and  put  an  end  to  the  disturbance. 
If   this    be    the    right    way    of   putting    it, 
Gascony  is  the  bone  of  contention,   and  the 
war   is   merely   a    renewal    of  that    between 
Edward  I.  and  Philip  IV.     But  the  assump- 
tion here  is  that  the  retention  of  Gascony 
was   so   important    to   the    English    that   no 
English    king    could    afford    to    abandon    it 
rather  than   risk  a  war.     The  most  practical 
reason   the   English  had  for  desiring   to  re- 
tain Gascony  was  the  existence  of  the  wine 


An  Illustration.  73 

trade.  Were,  then,  the  English  so  anxious 
about  their  Gascon  wine,  or  so  careful  of 
the  traditional  rights  of  the  English  crown 
in  Gascon)^,  that  they  practically  forced  the 
king  into  declaring  war  ?  There  is  no  evi- 
dence to  support  such  a  view.  The  great 
English  barons  drank  a  deal  of  Gascon  wine ; 
they  made  something  out  of  the  royal  rights 
in  Gascony,  and,  as  landowners,  they  must 
have  been  interested  in  the  Gascon  trade. 
But,  apart  from  their  own  profits,  they  were 
certainly  not  very  anxious  to  uphold  royal 
rights,  and,  moreover,  they  do  not  seem  to 
have  moved  in  the  matter.  The  Gascon 
barons  were  more  fully  interested  in  the 
question,  for  they  were  essentially  wine  pro- 
ducers. But  they  had  little  or  no  influence 
in  England.  The  merchants  and  towns- 
people of  England  may  have  been  ready  to 
make  sacrifices  to  keep  their  trade,  but  you 
can  hardly  say  more.  There  is  no  likeli- 
hood or  evidence  of  any  serious  pressure 
being  put  upon  the  king  by  his  own  sub- 
jects.    The  theory   breaks  down.     We  must 


74     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

return  to  the  king.     Any   attempt  to  solve 

political  problems  of  the  fourteenth  century 

without  reference  to  the  king  is  sure  to  break 

down.     One  may  be  able  to  ignore  modern 

Prime  Ministers,  but  never  medieval  kings. 

We  must  look  rather  more  closely  at  the 

king.     We  know  that  he  used  a  very  large 

amount   of  Gascon   wine   and   that   he  only 

occasionally  paid  for  some  of  it.     Moreover, 

the   more  wine  was  imported  the  more  the 

king  made  by  way  of  custom.     And  he  not 

only  bought  wine  without  paying  for  it  and 

took  barrels  in  prise,  but  he  also   sold  wine 

himself.     He  had  a  very  serious  interest  in 

the  Gascon  wine  trade,  an  interest  that  can 

be    measured    by    considerable    amounts    in 

money.     In  the  year  1337  Edward  III.  owes 

£437    to    one    wine    merchant   and   £221    to 

another.     He  orders    600    casks    of  wine   in 

1333  and  500  more  in  1335.     Nor  is  it  only 

a  question  of  wine   to   him.     All    the   royal 

rights  in  Gascony  are  of  the  nature  of  more 

or  less  lucrative  property,  and  mean  income. 

Loss  of  Gascony  would  mean  loss  of  income, 


An  Illustration.  75 

and  no  medieval  king  loses  income  if  he  can 
help  it.  And  it  is  not  only  a  question  of 
Gascony.  All  disturbance  of  trade  in  the 
Channel  affected  the  king's  income,  because 
the  more  trade  flourished  the  more  customs 
the  king  raised.  As  soon  as  we  look  at  all 
closely  at  the  business,  we  see  that  King 
Edward  had  solid,  quite  ordinary  financial 
reasons  for  doing  something.  Further,  we 
have  to  remember  that  conquest  in  Scotland 
or  in  France  meant,  of  course,  considerable 
outlay  and  risk,  but  meant  increase  of  income, 
besides  honour  and  glory,  if  only  the  thing 
were  effectively  done.  On  the  one  hand, 
then,  danger  of  loss,  on  the  other  prospect  of 
gain,  as  well  as  of  the  satisfaction  of  vanity 
by  honour  and  glory :  what  more  is  wanted 
to  explain  the  action  of  Edward  III.  or  of  any 
normal  man  ?  But,  if  you  do  want  more, 
there  is  resentment ;  there  is,  possibly,  a  belief 
in  his  own  right  to  the  French  throne ;  and 
there  is,  finally,  the  certainty  that  the  war 
will  serve  the  interests  and  express  the  senti- 
ments of  a  large  number  of  his  subjects. 


76     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

Are  we  now  attributing  too  much  to  the 
king?  If  the  loss  of  Gascony  would  have 
fallen  wholly  upon  him,  if  the  possible  gains 
of  war  would  have  fallen  entirely  to  him, 
then,  indeed,  we  might  argue  that  it  would 
have  been  impossible  for  Edward  III.  if  not  to 
make  war,  at  least  to  sustain  it.  But  this  is 
not  the  case.  The  English  people  as  a  whole 
had  quite  a  practical  interest  in  clearing  the 
narrow  seas  of  French  pirates  and  in  salving 
the  Gascon  and  Flemish  trade,  and  they,  too, 
were  moved  by  sense  of  injury  and  by  belief 
that  they  had  rights  in  France.  The  king, 
after  all,  does  but  represent  his  subjects  in 
the  matter.  His  interests  in  it  are  theirs. 
Nor  can  we  suppose  that  Edward  III.  ignored 
the  attitude  of  his  subjects.  He  had,  as  we 
say,  much  power,  but  he  was  no  despot, 
even  in  theory.  The  constitutional  position 
of  the  king  has  its  bearing  on  the  causation 
of  the  war. 

If  we  are  right  so  far,  then  the  commence- 
ment of  the  war  was  not  due,  to  any  seriously 
troublesome    extent,    to    the    personality    of 


An  Illustration.  77 

Edward  III.  It  is  not  his  unique  personal 
character,  as  such,  but  his  position  as  king 
that  is  mainly  concerned.  It  is  his  financial 
position,  the  nature  of  his  royal  rights,  and, 
indirectly,  his  constitutional  position :  and 
almost  any  man  in  his  position  we  should 
expect  to  act  as  he  did.  His  claim  to  the 
crown  of  France  is  another  matter.  But  we 
have  indicated,  at  least,  that  he  had  good 
and  obvious  reasons  for  making  the  claim, 
and  we  have  shown  some  cause  to  believe 
that  the  claim  was  rather  a  matter  of  the 
conduct  of  the  war  than  a  cause  of  its 
beginning. 

Historical  truth  is  so  many-sided  a  thing 
that  it  is  only  by  viewing  it  from  many 
distinct  points  that  one  may  hope  to  seize 
the  whole.  There  is  another  way  in  which 
the  whole  matter  may  be  put  and  which  will 
express  part  of  the  truth.  If  the  French 
were  resolved  to  seize  Gascony  and  the 
English  to  retain  it,  then  war  was  inevitable, 
and  if  Edward  had  not  begun  it  the  French 
would  have  done  so.     This  consideration  does 


78     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

nothing  to  explain  why  the  English  wanted 
to  keep  Gascony  or  the  French  to  get  it ;  it 
does  nothing  to  explain  why  the  war  came 
when  it  did  and  in  the  form  in  which  it  did 
come :  it  does  not,  in  fact,  bear  on  the  actual 
commencement  of  the  war  at  all.  But  it  does 
relieve  us  of  some  of  the  trouble  attaching 
to  any  absolute  choice  on  Edward  III.'s  part. 
War  was  certain  to  arise  over  Gascony  unless 
he  chose  to  abandon  it.  He  chose,  rather,  to 
begin  it  himself. 

Our  statement  of  the  facts  and  our  analysis 
of  them  have  alike  been  incomplete ;  but 
they  are  sufficient  for  our  present  purposes. 
It  is  on  such  lines  that  this  and  all  similar 
problems  have  to  be  solved. 


79 


VI. 

HISTORY  AS  A   PAGEANT. 

Such  objections  to  the  theory  of  history  as 
a  science  as  have  so  far  been  dealt  with 
have  been  assertions  of  the  extreme  diffi- 
culty or  even  impossibility  of  arriving  at 
real  knowledge  of  the  causes  of  social  and 
political  phenomena.  We  have  now  to 
consider  what  is  not  logically  an  objection 
to,  but  is  rather  a  traversing  of,  the  whole 
contention  implied  in  that  theory.  We  have 
to  consider  an  alternative  view  of  the  best 
way  of  approaching  and  dealing  with  the 
past  life  of  humanity.  However  enthusi- 
astic any  one  may  be  over  the  conception 
of  scientific  history,  it  would  be  very  foolish 
not  to  admit  that  to  a  large  number  of  minds 
it   does  not  appeal  at   all.      Indeed,    to   the 


80    Place  of  History  in  Education. 

greater  number  of  minds  no  form  of  science 
appeals  at  all  strongly.     People  are  unintelli- 
gently  glad  of  the  practical  results  secured 
by   the   applications   of  science    to    common 
needs ;    but  for  science  itself  they  commonly 
care  little  or  nothing.     They  even   estimate 
the  value  of  it  in  terms  of  money  to  be  made 
by  its  application  to  business.     But  it  seems 
tolerably  certain  that  nobody  will  ever  make 
much  money  out  of  historical  science.     Again,  • 
there  are  sciences  the  results  of  which,  even 
when  not  what  is  called  practical,  are  impress- 
ive to  the  meanest  imagination.     The  sensa- 
tional quality  of  certain  astronomical  and  of 
certain    biological    conclusions    escapes    only 
the  dullest.     But  whatever  admirable  results 
in  the  way  of  a  destruction  of  superstitions, 
an   increased   rationalism    in   politics,  an  in- 
creased  sense   of   the  future,  and  so  on,  we 
may   expect  to  arise  from  historical  science, 
we  can  expect  no  results  of  immediate  and 
inevitable  impressiveness  any  more  than  of 
"  practical "    value.     And    so    we   shall    have 
to  become  far  more  intelligent  than  we  are 


History  as  a  Pageant.  81 

before  many  of  us  cease  to  declare  that 
scientific  history  is  dull,  and  to  ask  the  use 
of  it. 

It  may  be  thought  that  mere  assertions 
of  the  dulness  or  uselessness  of  historical 
science  are  not  worth  traversing  otherwise 
than  indirectly.  But  there  are  points  of 
view  from  which  such  assertions  may,  in  a 
certain  sense,  be  made  unanswerably. 

It  is  not  a  matter  of  a  single  point  of  view 
or  of  a  single  theory  alternative  to  that  of 
history  as  a  science.  It  is  a  matter  of  quite 
multitudinous  points  of  view,  all  equally 
non- scientific,  but  the  common  quality  of 
which  is  a  little  hard  to  define.  One  may 
distinguish  them,  perhaps  somewhat  crudely, 
but  sufficiently  for  our  present  purpose,  as 
those  points  of  view  which  are  essentially 
personal.  The  scientific  point  of  view  may 
fairly  be  called  impersonal.  It  is  not  a 
natural  point  of  view  in  the  present  state 
of  humanity.  A  natural,  that  is,  a  really 
personal  point  of  view,  is  an  expression  of 
the  whole  man.     It  is  that  point  from  which 

F 


82     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

a  man  looks  at  things  with  the  whole  of  him- 
self. It  is  not  reached  by  any  mere  process 
of  reasoning,  even  if  it  be  reached  by  reason- 
ing in  any  degree  at  all.  It  is  not  deliberately 
taken  up.  At  any  one  moment  the  man  is 
there.  It  comprehends  all  a  man's  sense 
of  values  of  every  kind,  and  it  includes  all 
his  prejudices  and  his  habitual  tone  of  feel- 
ing. It  is,  at  bottom,  the  man  himself.  But 
the  scientific  point  of  view  is  one  deliberate- 
ly reached  and  taken,  and  has  reference  to 
values  of  only  one  kind.  It  is  more  natural 
to  one  man  than  to  another,  and  it  may,  to  a 
great  extent,  become  habitual ;  but  it  is  never 
simply  natural.  Nobody  looks  at  his  friends 
and  neighbours  from  a  scientific  point  of  view. 
There  may  be  other  points  of  view  equally 
impersonal,  but  we  are  not  called  upon  to 
consider  them  here.  We  have  now  to  deal 
with  people  who  insist  on  approaching  the 
subject  -  matter  of  history  from  personal 
points  of  view ;  and  because  they  are  many, 
there  is  difficulty  in  stating  their  case.  Let 
us    suppose    a    mind    which    objects    to    the 


History  as  a  Pageant.  83 

scientific  theory  of  history  as  inadequate 
at  best,  and  which  sympathises  with  all 
other  objectors  in  the  same  sense,  what- 
ever exactly  their  views  may  be.  Let  us 
suppose  further  that  this  mind  desires  to 
state  the  common  case  of  all  such  objectors. 

It  is,  perhaps,  impossible  that  he  should 
do  this  at  all  adequately,  but  we  may  con- 
ceive that  he  might  express  himself  some- 
what as  follows  : — 

"I  do  not  care,"  he  might  say,  "or  I 
care  very  little,  for  all  this  worry  about 
causation.  You  admit  that  your  account 
of  the  evolution  of  society  will  always  be 
very  incomplete,  in  that  there  are  great 
tracts  of  time  about  which  you  have  little 
information  or  none  at  all.  You  admit  that 
your  historic  periods  cover  only  a  small 
space  of  the  history  of  humanity.  You 
admit  that,  what  with  great  men  and  other 
accidents,  your  best  generalisations  will  only 
be  approximations  to  the  truth,  even  where 
your  evidence  is  most  complete.  You  ad- 
mit that  your  explanations  of  the  action  of 


84     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

masses   by   dominant   motives   involve   some 
decree  of  error  in  every  case.     You  admit, 
moreover,  that  this  double  process  of  analysis 
and    of  synthesis   by   means   of    which    you 
are    to    reach    your    conclusions    is    a    very 
delicate  and  difficult  process,  and  necessarily 
very  slow.      You  confess  that  most  modern 
research   is   valuable   rather  for  a  somewhat 
distant  future — of  which,   again,   you   admit 
that  you  know  nothing — than  for  anything 
that  by  any  stretch  we  can  call  the  present ; 
and    yet    you    ask    me    to    admit    that   this 
endless  groping  is  the  most  profitable  mode 
of   dealing   with    the    human    past.      I  deny 
it  altogether.     The   very  most  I   can   admit 
is    that    it    is    not    an    altogether    irrational 
procedure.      I   admit  that  by  long   striving 
and  patience  some  large  view  of  the  human 
past,  some  new  light  on  the  human  present, 
may    eventually    be    attained.       Let    those 
who    work   in    this    hope    continue   to    work 
if  this   hope   be    sufficient  for  them ;    but   I 
must   assert   that   your   utmost   possible    at- 
tainment in  this  direction,  could  it  even  be 


History  as  a  Pageant.  85 

realised  at  once,  would  not  be  of  such  value 
to  us  as  what  can  certainly  be  had  by  treat- 
ing the  past  in  a  quite  different  manner 
and  spirit.  As  to  the  people  of  the  far 
future,  like  you,  I  know  nothing.  It  is 
possible  that  these  people  may  care  more 
for  attenuated  but  approximately  correct 
generalisations  than  for  flesh  and  blood, 
for  the  strivings  and  sufferings  and  tri- 
umphs and  strange  adventures  of  individual 
men  and  women.  It  is  possible ;  and,  again, 
it  is  possible  that  they  will  care  for  none 
of  these  things.  In  any  case,  our  present 
efforts  cannot  be  directed  by  their  hypo- 
thetical tastes.  For  my  part  I  believe  that 
there  is  only  one  thing  perennially  valu- 
able to  humanity,  and  that  is  the  human 
creature,  the  unique  creature,  the  individual 
soul.  The  proper  study  of  mankind  is  not 
generalised  masses  of  people,  not  man,  but 
men.  We  do  not  greatly  care — this  is  the 
essence  of  it — for  anything  that  appeals  to 
the  mere  intellect.  Human  beings  cannot 
in    the    long-run   be   satisfied    except   by  an 


86     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

appeal  to  their  total  humanity.  The  intel- 
lect is  a  mere  instrument  of  the  desires  that 
rule  the  world.  The  desire  of  humanity  is  for 
the  human.  You  ask  us  to  look  at  human  life 
as  a  series  of  changes  going  on  from  genera- 
tion to  generation,  changes  of  social  and  legal 
structure,  economic  changes,  moral  changes, 
political  changes ;  and  you  ask  us  to  con- 
fine ourselves  to  trying  to  establish  causation 
throughout  the  series.  You  condemn  as 
irrelevant  to  this  precious  business  any 
attention  to  the  individual  as  such  or  to 
any  of  those  aspects  of  life  which  are  most 
attractive  to  humanity.  You  talk  of  the 
tragic  and  of  the  comic  as  mere  aspects  of 
things  without  real  relations.  But  you 
admit  that  your  causal  relations  are  also 
only  aspects  of  things,  and,  moreover,  that 
they  appeal,  in  the  main,  only  to  the  intel- 
lect. Causation  may,  of  course,  be  inter- 
esting. One  may  like  to  know  something 
of  processes  —  of  how  the  English  came  to 
be  in  India,  of  how  the  House  of  Lords 
comes  to  be  where  it  is.     Such   odd  things 


History  as  a  Pageant.  87 

it  is  pleasing  to  know  about.     It  is  good  to 
know   such    things,    and    to    be   able   to   see 
modern   institutions   and   laws    and    customs 
in  the  light  of  their  origin.     But  we  certainly 
don't  want  only  this  sort  of  thing.      What 
we    want    in    history    is    not    so    much    the 
causation    of   change    in    human    life    as   the 
human  life  itself.     We  want  the  warm  breath- 
ing  things,   the    men    and   women   in    their 
habits   as   they   lived,   with   all   their   irrele- 
vant  passions    about  them.      These   are   the 
things   we   love   for    their    own    sake  —  that 
is,   for   their   correspondence   with  us.      The 
study   of    them    enlarges    and    enriches   our 
personal  life  as   no   study  of  mere  causation 
ever  can.     We  do  not  care  very  much  why 
Mary  Stuart  failed.     We  want  to  realise  her 
in  imagination ;  we  want  her  point  of  view 
rather    than    any    analysis    of    the    factors 
which    ruined    her    and    which    she    herself 
did    not    understand.      To    most    people    of 
time  past   and   present,    at   least,  history  is 
a  pageant,  no   less   and  no   more.       It  is  a 
vast  procession    of  human    lives,    fascinating 


88     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

to  us  because  of  the  likeness  underlying 
all  the  differences  and  because  of  the  differ- 
ences through  which  we  see  the  likeness. 
We  want,  to  use  an  image  of  Macaulay's,  to 
travel  in  past  time,  as  we  want  to  travel  in 
strange  countries.  We  want  to  see  life.  We 
want  to  see  it  under  conditions  which  we 
can  only  reach  through  the  good  offices  of 
the  historian ;  to  see  strange  customs  and 
costumes  and  strivings  over  ideals  that  are 
strange.  And  we  wish  for  an  historian  to 
be  our  guide,  philosopher,  and  friend,  our 
courier,  our  Baedeker  to  the  past.  History 
is  full  of  glorious  stories,  matter  for  terror 
and  pity,  and  matter  for  laughter  and  rejoic- 
ing. The  historian  we  desire  is  he  who  will 
force  us  to  realise  all  this.  If  he  be  an  artist 
we  shall  value  him  not  only  for  what  he 
shows  us  but  for  his  way  of  showing  it, 
for  his  suggestiveness  and  for  his  passion 
and  even  for  his  moralisings  and  specula- 
tions. We  shall  value  him  for  what  he  is. 
We  shall  delight,  for  the  time,  in  loving 
what  he  loves  and  in  hating  what  he  hates, 


History  as  a  Pageant.  89 

and   never   ask  whether  he  be   impartial   or 
no.      And   if  you   say   that  such  tastes  are 
childish,   we  reply   that,  in  the  same  sense, 
the  whole  human  race  is  very  childish,  and 
that    it    will    be    long    indeed    ere   it   ceases 
to   be   so,    if  it  ever  ceases  to  be  so  at  all. 
And   if  you   ask    what    good    we   expect   to 
derive  from  this  kind  of  history,  we  say  it 
is  the  same  kind  of  good  that  one  gets  from 
novels   and   from    plays    and    poems,    along 
with    an    element    of    some    importance,    an 
element     of     absolute     fact     and     of     true 
human     memories     that     is    not     in     them. 
We  say,  moreover,  that  pity  is  always  good 
and  laughter  is  always  good,  and  that  any 
uplifting    or    enlarging    emotion    is    always 
good.      We  do  not  live  by  ideas  alone ;  we 
live    also    and    in    still    deeper    measure    by 
emotions :  and   certainly  we  do  not  live  by 
ideas   of    causation.       In    truth    we   live   by 
the  imagination,  and  to  enrich  that  and  to 
stimulate  it  healthily  and  at  the  same  time 
to  keep  it  in  touch  with  the  realities  of  life, 
this  is  the  true  function  of  history." 


90    Place  of  History  in  Education. 

It  is  not  necessary  to  analyse  at  all 
minutely  this  farrago  of  statements.  Certain 
main  facts  concerning  it  seem  to  stand 
out  quite  clearly.  To  begin  with,  there 
are  certain  exaggerations  involved  in  the 
foregoing  statement  of  the  adverse  case. 
They  might  have  been  avoided ;  they  are 
no  essential  part  of  the  case  itself;  but 
it  was  as  well  that  they  should  be  included, 
for  they  are  such  as  one  frequently  hears. 
It  is  a  gross  as  well  as  a  pertinent  exagger- 
ation to  say,  or  to  imply,  that  the  scientific 
historian  of  the  present  day  cannot  hope 
to  attain  for  himself  or  bis  generation  any 
real  understanding  of  the  past,  or  light 
on  the  present.  We  have  admitted  nothing 
of  the  sort.  If  it  be  true  that  the  results 
of  much  modern  research  are  for  the  future 
historian  to  use  rather  than  for  ourselves, 
and  if  it  be  true  that  even  all  our  con- 
clusions may  subsequently  have  to  be  modi- 
fied, this  by  no  means  involves  that  we 
can  at  present  reach  no  conclusions  of  value. 
We  would   rather   say  that  we   are   already 


History  as  a  Pageant.  91 

in  a  position  to  reach  many  conclusions 
of  value,  and  even  that  we  have  reached 
some.  It  may  well  be,  indeed,  that  we 
are  hindered  from  reaching  others  and  from 
putting  those  already  within  our  reach  more 
distinctly  than  we  do,  because  historians 
are  not  agreed  about  values  and  persist  in 
trying  to  extract  too  many  kinds  of  value 
from  the  past  and  so  dissipate  their  energies 
and  confuse  their  results. 

Again,  to  say  that  the  theory  of  scientific 
history  asks  people  to  look  upon  the  past 
life  of  humanity  as  a  mere  series  of  con- 
nected changes  is  not  so  much  an  exag- 
gerated as  a  false  statement ;  for  you  cannot 
look  at  the  past  at  all  without  seeing  more 
than  that,  and  you  cannot  deal  at  all  with 
the  changes  of  things  without  thinking  of 
the  things  themselves.  You  cannot  write 
of  the  building  up  of  an  empire  without 
studying  much  that  is,  in  one  sense,  merely 
incidental  to  the  process  and  in  another 
is  part  of  it. 

But    when    we   have   said   this    much,    we 


92     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

must  admit  not  only  that  there  is  truth 
in  the  view  which  has  been  presented,  but 
even  that,  in  a  sense,  it  is  altogether  true. 
So  far  as  it  expresses  a  genuine  point  of 
view  it  is  incontrovertible.  We  come  down 
to  the  unassailable  personal  feeling.  It  is 
useless  and  absurd  to  tell  any  one  that  he 
ought  to  like  this  rather  than  the  other, 
unless  by  your  "ought"  you  mean  some- 
thing specifically  reasonable.  You  are  quite 
right  to  tell  a  man  that  he  will  be  a  fool 
to  throw  himself  over  a  cliff,  unless  he 
wants  to  be  killed ;  but  if  he  does  want 
to  be  killed,  your  proposition  goes  to  the 
ground  with  him.  There  are  a  large  number 
of  people  who  are  not  especially  interested 
in  causation,  but  who  are  more  or  less  in 
love  with  life  and  like  to  see  as  much  as 
they  can  of  it  on  many  sides.  The  demand 
of  these  people  for  a  kind  of  history  adapted 
to  their  desires  will  certainly  be  met,  partly 
because  the  demand  is  so  large  that  it 
will  more  or  less  pay  to  answer  it,  and 
partly  because  such   people    will   themselves 


History  as  a  Pageant.  93 

write  history  as  they  like  it  to  be  written. 
You  have,  in  fact,  demands  for,  roughly 
speaking,  two  different  kinds  of  history ; 
and  the  historian,  perhaps  not  quite  know- 
ing what  he  wants  himself,  or  sympathising 
with  both  demands,  or  wishing  to  please 
as  many  people  as  possible,  is  led  to  write 
now  as  a  scientific  student,  now  as  a  moral- 
ist, now  as  an  artist  in  the  dramatic  or 
the  picturesque,  now  as  a  guide  to  a 
museum  of  curiosities, — with  the  nonde- 
script sort  of  results  that  we  get. 

We  may  be  led,  at  this  point,  to  ask 
how  far  this  demand  for  pictures  of  human 
life,  for  imaginative  or  simply  realistic  treat- 
ment of  the  past  as  a  pageant  of  miscel- 
laneous attractiveness,  is  justified  in  reason ; 
but  there  is,  surely,  no  question.  To  assert 
that  this  demand  is  unreasonable  would  be 
absurd ;  and  perhaps  you  could  hardly  do 
the  cause  of  scientific  history  more  harm 
than  by  making  such  an  assertion.  To 
assert,  for  instance,  that  Carlyle's  great 
pictorial     and     humorous     sermon     on     the 


94     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

French  Revolution  is  of  little  or  no  value, 
because  the  sermon  is  not  analytic  and 
gives  only  the  vaguest  and  most  inade- 
quate idea  of  the  causes  of  the  great  catas- 
trophe, because  it  emphasises  a  few  features 
and  utterly  neglects  others  to  the  destruction 
of  all  right  proportion,  this  would  be  mon- 
strously wrong.  The  value  of  a  sermon  does 
not  lie  in  its  text.  Even  though  the  text 
be  finer  than  anything  in  the  sermon,  yet 
the  discourse  is  the  thing.  To  say  that  a 
great  artist,  or  a  great  humourist,  or  a 
prophet,  cannot  use  historical  material  to 
any  fine  purpose  would  be  to  talk  down- 
right nonsense.  We  want  all  of  such  work 
that  we  can  get.  And  if  any  one  says  that 
this  is  the  very  finest  way  of  using  his- 
torical material,  and  that,  as  has  been  said, 
the  finest  of  English  historians  are  Shake- 
speare and  Scott,  that  may  be  undeniably 
true  from  his  point  of  view. 

But   the   difference   between   this   kind   of 
history  and  the  other  kind  must  be  clearly 


History  as  a  Pageant.  95 

understood.  What  Shakespeare  gives  us  is 
not,  from  the  scientific  point  of  view,  his- 
tory at  all.  It  is  pure  pageantry,  and  not 
even  realistic  pageantry  considered  histori- 
cally. It  deals  with  individuals  and  their 
fortunes,  and  the  fact  that  some  of  these 
individuals  happen  to  be  kings  is  nothing 
to  the  purpose.  It  creates  an  atmosphere 
regardless  of  any  correspondence  between 
that  atmosphere  and  that  of  the  real 
historic  personages  it  includes.  Its  back- 
ground is  arbitrary  or  vague,  and  its  back- 
ground includes  almost  everything  with 
which  the  scientific  historian  has  to  deal. 
It  has  nothing  whatever  to  say  to  social 
development.  It  is  capable  of  writing  a 
history  of  the  reign  of  King  John  without 
even  mentioning  the  Great  Charter ;  because, 
when  you  come  to  look  at  it,  the  Great 
Charter  is  not  dramatic.  Yet  if  any 
one  says  that  he  finds  more  profit  in 
Shakespeare's  Henry  IV.  than  in  any  con- 
ceivable   analysis    of    that   monarch's    actual 


96    Place  of  History  in  Education. 

position  and  relations,  what  more  is  there 
to  be  said  ?  There  is  this  to  be  said.  At 
the  risk  of  being  taken  to  be  as  stupid 
as  the  mathematician  who,  after  reading 
Paradise  Lost,  inquired  what  it  proved,  we 
must  point  out  that  Shakespeare  proves 
nothing.  True,  he  has  not  tried  to  prove 
anything ;  but  that  is  just  the  point — that 
he  has  not  tried.  It  is  probably  impossible 
to  frame  any  tolerable  definition  of  history, 
except  from  the  scientific  point  of  view.  All 
other  kinds  of  history  are  written  from  a 
point  of  view  which  is  that  of  the  natural 
man  and  which  varies  with  each  writer. 
But  we  reach  here  to  a  fundamental  differ- 
ence. The  scientific  historian  must  always 
be  trying  to  prove  something :  the  other 
kinds  of  historians  are  not.  The  value  of 
the  scientific  historian's  analysis  of  Henry 
IV. 's  position  depends  upon  the  degree  in 
which  it  helps  to  explain  other  things.  It 
will  help,  let  us  say,  towards  an  explanation 
of  the  Wars  of  the  Roses.  In  any  case  it 
is  only  as   an    explanation    that   it   has  any 


History  as  a  Pageant.  97 

value  at  all.  But  Shakespeare's  treatment 
of  the  matter,  however  diversely  suggestive, 
establishes  nothing,  explains  nothing,  and 
is  intended  to  meet  a  demand  totally  distinct 
from  the  demand  for  explanations. 


98 


VII. 

OF  RECONCILIATION. 

The  attempt  to  reconcile  the  logically  in- 
compatible has  always  at  once  entertained, 
and  to  some  extent  practically  profited, 
humanity.  The  inconsistent  desires  of  man- 
kind require  such  a  procedure.  When  two 
theories  are  hopelessly  opposed,  it  may  well 
be  that,  by  working  on  both,  we  may 
obtain  desirable  results  impossible  to  con- 
sistency. 

How  far  is  any  reconciliation  possible 
between  the  two  views  of  history  which 
have  been  presented  ?  It  seems  fairly  obvious 
that  ideally  they  cannot  be  reconciled  at 
all.  Either  you  desire  to  prove  something 
or    you    do    not ;    either    you    are    bent    on 


Of  Reconciliation.  99 

studying  causation  for  the  sake  of  under- 
standing actual  development  or  you  are  not. 
Moreover,  you  cannot  really  be  doing  this 
and  something  else  at  the  same  time,  how- 
ever much  you  may  wish  to  do  so.  You 
can  analyse  your  phenomena  with  a  view 
to  explanation  on  one  page  and  treat  the 
same  phenomena  as  picturesque  or  dramatic 
or  what  not  on  the  next.  But  the  one  page 
is  unnecessary  to  the  other;  one  or  the 
other,  or  both,  if  you  please,  are  of  the  nature 
of  digressions.  It  must  be  observed,  too, 
that  while  the  tragic  and  the  comic  and  the 
ethical  are  closely  interlinked  with  each  other 
in  the  nature  of  the  human  sou],  they  are 
not  essentially  interlinked  with  causation. 
You  may  write  with  a  double  or  treble 
purpose,  but  they  remain  distinct.  They 
are  in  no  sense  reconciled  by  merely  co- 
existing. And  from  their  co-existence  all 
your  purposes,  all  your  effects,  are  likely 
to  suffer.  Shakespeare  does  not  make  the 
mistake  of  bothering  us  with  a  discussion 
of  Henry   IV. 's   financial  position  or  of  the 


ioo    Place  of  History  in  Education. 

resources  of  the   Percies  on  the  eve  of  the 
battle  of  Shrewsbury. 

If  the  subject-matter  of  history  be  treated 
as  a  miscellaneous  pageant,  history  becomes 
something  far  more  nearly  allied  to  the 
novel  than  to  any  scientific  study.  It  is 
impressionistic  art  or  it  is  antiquarianism  and 
deals  in  curios,  or  it  is  simply  biography 
in  a  complicated  form.  Its  value  will 
then  be  as  miscellaneous  as  that  of  all 
museums,  picture-galleries,  plays,  poems,  and 
novels  taken  together.  It  is  hard  to  see 
what  can  be  gained  by  attempting  to 
unite  this  kind  of  history  with  the  other. 
It  is  impossible  really  to  unite  them,  and 
what  is  gained  by  sandwiching  your  scientific 
discussions  with  bits  of  impressionism  is  not 
manifest.  The  task  of  the  scientific  historian 
as  such  is  quite  big  enough  for  any  one.  It 
seems  as  though  he  must  inevitably  lose 
threads  and  confuse  himself  and  even  fail 
to  hold  his  main  purpose  clearly  before 
himself  if  he  attempts  not  only  to  analyse 
and  state  causal  relations  but  tries  also   to 


Of  Reconciliation.  101 

act  as  an  exponent  of  the  human  comedy 
generally.  We  ought  not  to  expect  the  one 
mind  to  do  the  two  things.  In  the  first 
chapter  of  his  '  History  of  Civilisation  in 
England,'  Buckle  remarked  that  the  higher 
kind  of  scientific  mind  had  never  taken  up 
history.  It  might  be  said  that  the  higher 
kind  of  poetic  mind  has  only  rarely  touched 
it.  How  far  these  assertions  are  true  it  is, 
happily,  needless  to  inquire ;  but  any  truth 
there  may  be  in  them  is  probably  partly 
due  to  the  fact  that,  at  least  till  recently, 
the  historian  has  been  expected  to  combine 
the  incompatible.  What  we  still  want  is  a 
much  more  distinct  division  of  labour. 
We  want  the  artist  for  the  sake  of  his 
artistry  and  the  expert  guide  because  all 
intelligent  people  are  more  or  less  col- 
lectors of  curiosities.  It  might,  indeed,  be 
said  that  we  want  the  poet  and  the  prophet 
to  supplement  the  work  of  the  scientific 
historian.  The  scientific  historian  himself 
will  want  history  written  from  other  points 
of    view    and    with    other   objects    than    his 


102    Place  of  History  in  Education, 

own ;  because  such  history  will  frequently  be 
suggestive  and   helpful   to   him.     But  what, 
above  all,  we  want  is  to  see  the  two  things  as 
distinct,  and  to  conceive  of  scientific  history 
as  a  thing   logically  complete   in   itself.      It 
once  the  distinction  be  fully   and   generally 
realised,  the  further  division  of  labour  will 
come.     It  is  useless  to  say  that  the  scientific 
historian  should  never  on  any  account  drop  into 
poetry  or  moralising.     But  if  he  realise  what 
his  main  purpose  is  and  pursue  it  honestly, 
then  he  will  always  know  that  in  dropping 
into  poetry  he  is  yielding  to  temptation,  and 
he   will  yield  only  rarely  unless  he  be  alto- 
gether of  the  wicked.      On   the  other  hand, 
those  who  write  history  from  some  personal 
point  of  view  should  feel  themselves  far  more 
free  and  do  their  business  much   better  for 
realising  that  they  are  not  expected  to  give 
explanations  as  such  or  to  deal  with  things 
merely  because  they   are   important   from  a 
scientific    point    of    view.      It    must    be    of 
advantage  to  an  artist  to  know  that  he  may 
write    about    King   John    without    reference 


Of  Reconciliation.  103 

to  the  Great  Charter.  It  is  probable  that 
Carlyle  would  have  done  still  better  than 
he  did  had  he  clearly  known  that  he  was 
writing  a  sermon.  The  artist  who  deals  in 
history  cannot,  of  course,  be  quite  free.  He 
cannot  have  the  freedom  of  a  novelist. 
He  is  not  bound  to  explain  more  than  his 
artistic  purpose  requires  him  to  explain ;  he 
is  not  bound  to  be  exhaustive ;  he  is  not 
bound  —  he  may  even  be  bound  not  —  to 
argue :  but  he  is  bound  not  deliberately  to 
mislead.  The  more  closely  he  stands  by 
fact  the  better.  In  some  ways,  perhaps,  he 
will  be  even  more  meticulously  accurate 
than  the  scientific  historian,  from  whose 
point  of  view  so  many  things  are  of  no 
account.  But  the  artist  is  not  bound  even 
to  refer  to  anything  which  is  of  no  account 
to  him.  He  must  be  all  the  more  scrupu- 
lous. If  he  desires  to  invent,  let  him  become 
a  novelist.  There  is  clearly  no  excuse  for 
him  if  he  perverts  knowledge  and  yet  calls 
himself  an  historian  in  any  sense.  If  he  be 
half-historian,  half-novelist,  he  can  gain  little, 


104     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

if  anything,  from  his  historical  basis.  He 
will,  rather,  destroy  it.  Yet  while  he  re- 
nounces the  freedom  of  the  novelist  his 
work  will  gain  a  certain  charm  and 
a  certain  point  which  the  novelist  can 
never  obtain.  The  records  of  the  past  are 
a  practically  inexhaustible  storehouse  of 
every  kind  of  interest.  Just  as  scientific 
history  has  suffered  by  pursuit  of  what  is 
irrelevant  to  its  purpose,  so  also  has  artistic 
history.  We  may  look  forward  to  far  more 
splendid  historical  romance  than  we  have 
ever  yet  had,  except  from  Shakespeare. 

It  is  needless  to  expatiate  on  this  point. 
We  have  now  to  some  extent  cleared  the 
ground,  and  can  face  the  question  of  the 
teaching  of  history  as  part  of  the  education 
of  the  more  or  less  young  mind.  What 
kind  of  history  is  it  that  we  are  to  teach  ? 
Are  we  to  teach  history  as  a  science,  or 
are  we  to  teach  it,  primarily,  from  some 
personal  point  of  view  ?  Or  are  we  to  try 
to  combine  the  two  things  ?  Even  though 
we  admit   that   history  cannot  satisfactorily 


Of  Reconciliation.  105 

be  written  from  the  scientific  point  of  view 
and  from  some  other  at  the  same  time,  it 
does  not  follow  that  a  teacher  of  young 
people  should  be  strictly  scientific  or  strictly 
unscientific.  The  teacher  may  prefer  to  give 
glimpses  of  both  ways  of  regarding  and 
treating  the  past.  The  answers  we  give  to 
these  questions  necessarily  depend  on  our 
ideal  of  what  education  should  effect. 


io6 


VIII. 

OF   EDUCATION. 

Befoke  one  can  get  to  grips  with  the  ques- 
tions, What  sort  of  history  are  we  to  teach 
and  how  are  we  to  teach  it?  certain  pre- 
vious questions  must  receive  some  sort  of 
answer.  Why  do  we  want  to  teach  history 
at  all  ?  is  the  first  of  such  questions  to 
confront  us ;  and  this  runs  up  into  a  larger 
question,  Why  do  we  want  to  teach 
anything  ? 

Now  in  answer  to  this  it  might  at  once 
be  said,  "  We  want  to  teach  certain  things 
because  they  are  practically  useful."  It  is 
worth  while  to  consider  this  answer  in  order 
clearly  to  establish,  at  the  outset,  a  necessary 
distinction.  "  Education,"  broadly  speaking, 
is    of   two    kinds.      There   is,    necessarily,    a 


Of  Education.  107 

deal  of  teaching  which  is  based  on  the 
desire  of  people  to  have  themselves  or 
their  children  taught  things  which,  they 
suppose,  will  be  practically  useful  to 
them. 

There  has  always  been  teaching  of  this 
kind  among  men,  and  was  before  men  were 
human,  as  there  is  now  among  the  animals. 
But  we  have  to  ask  what  "practical  useful- 
ness "  means.  If  a  man  wants  to  be  a  doctor 
or  a  lawyer  or  a  chemist  or  attache  to  an 
embassy,  and  cannot  become  one  without 
passing  an  examination,  he  must  have  teach- 
ing to  enable  him  to  pass,  and  such  teaching, 
it  will  be  generally  admitted,  is  "practically 
useful"  to  him.  Again,  to  teach  a  child  to 
read  and  write  is  admittedly  to  impart 
"practically  useful"  arts.  But  what  con- 
stitutes the  practical  usefulness  in  these 
cases  ?  Why  does  one  say  that  the  learning 
of  carpentry  is  practically  useful  and  the 
learning  of  Greek  of  no  practical  use?  It 
might  be  hastily  answered  that  carpentry 
and  reading  and  writing  are  of  assistance  in 


108     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

earning  one's  living,  whereas  Greek  .  .  . 
But  the  matter  is  not  so  simple  as  that. 
People,  for  instance,  talk  of  acquiring  the 
French  language  as  a  practically  useful  thing 
to  do.  Yet  in  most  cases  ability  to  speak 
French  does  not  help  towards  earning  a 
living.  It  will  help  one  to  travel  comfort- 
ably in  certain  parts  of  Europe :  it  may, 
perhaps,  help  one  to  understand  the  menu 
card  of  an  hotel.  These  things  also  are 
conceived  of  as  practical  uses,.  It  becomes 
clear  that  the  common  quality  of  all  this 
"  practical  usefulness  "  consists  in  ability  to 
do  some  definite  thing  which  it  is  assumed 
that  we  shall,  or  at  least  may,  want  to  do. 
Now  this  is  also  the  distinguishing  char- 
acter of  what  is  called  "technical"  educa- 
tion. We  reach  the  conclusion  that  the 
teaching  of  French  as  a  language  to  use 
in  travel  or  for  social  purposes  is  just  as 
much  technical  education  as  the  teaching  of 
carpentry  or  cookery.  In  putting  the  matter 
thus  we  are  giving  an  extension  to  the 
term  technical  education  as  it  is  ordinarily 


Of  Education.  109 

used.     But  it  appears  to  be   quite  a  logical 
extension. 

Evidently  there  is  a  radical  difference 
between  this  kind  of  education  and  the 
education  which  is  simply  a  training  of  the 
mind  in  power  and  in  knowledge.  This 
radical  difference  may,  perhaps,  be  stated 
thus.  "Technical"  teaching  is  that  which 
helps  the  individual  as  such  to  do  something 
he  will  presumably  wish  to  do ;  and  it  looks 
no  further.  But  teaching  of  the  higher,  or 
at  least  of  the  other,  kind  looks  beyond 
the  individual,  and  aims  not  so  much  at 
fitting  him  to  do  things  for  himself  as  at 
fitting  him  to  do  things  that  concern  every 
one,  and  that  concern  the  future  of  humanity. 
It  is,  one  might  say,  a  distinction  between 
education  from  the  private  and  personal 
point  of  view  and  education  from  the  point 
of  view  of  society  or  of  the  race. 

Now  it  is  only  with  education  in  this 
latter  and  larger  sense  that  the  historical 
teacher  can  seriously  be  concerned.  For  the 
amount  nf  "  pra-p-tinal   usefulness "  _to  be  got 


no    Place  of  History  in  Education. 

out  of  the  teaching  of  history  is  really 
minute.  No  doubt  it  may  enable  you  to 
understand  a  certain  number  of  references 
in  books,  newspapers,  and  conversation  that 
otherwise  would  be  quite  dark.  It  may 
possibly  enable  you  to  understand  why  a 
certain  class  of  people  engaged  in  our  edu- 
cational controversies  are  called  "  Crom- 
wellians."  It  may  throw  a  humorous  gleam 
on  some  picture  in  the  Royal  Academy.  It 
should  certainly  help  you  to  appreciate  the 
value  of  political  references  to  "feudalism" 
and  of  much  current  talk  about  the  "  lessons 
of  history."  Possibly  these,  in  their  small 
way,  are  practical  values.  Any  real  know- 
ledge of  history  will  certainly  help  you  to 
take  a  rational  view  of  current  politics  and 
of  social  and  economic  questions  of  the 
moment.  But  is  this  of  "  practical "  value  ? 
If  you  are  to  be  a  professional  politician  it 
may  be  doubted  whether  a  knowledge  of 
history  will  not  be  a  positive  hindrance  to 
your  career.  Your  references,  your  argu- 
ments   drawn    from    history,    will    be    much 


Of  Education.  1 1 1 

more  sharply  pointed  if  you  know  next  to 
nothing  about  it  than  they  can  be  if  you 
have  any  true  appreciation  of  the  elusive, 
complex  reality.  And  if  you  have  attained 
to  the  scientific  point  of  view  in  matters 
historical,  you  will  certainly  never  fit  in 
nicely  with  any  political  party.  So  that, 
on  the  whole,  we  may  conclude  that  the 
teaching  of  history  can  never  to  any  serious 
extent  become  a  part  of  technical  education. 
Our  questions,  Why  do  we  want  to  teach 
history  ?  and  Why  do  we  want  to  teach 
anything?  must  be  considered  without  any 
reference  at  all  to  that  kind  of  education. 
Wedo  not  want  to  t_ejich_Jiistory  in  order 
to  enable  people  to  understand  journalistic 
allusions. 

When  we  consider  the  amount  that  is 
talked  and  written  about  education  nowa- 
days, and  the  mass  of  literature  that  has 
developed  about  the  subject  in  the  last 
hundred  years,  it  might  seem  that  this 
question,  Why  do  we  want  to  teach  any- 
thing ?     should    be    easy    to    answer.       But 


1 1 2     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

though  we  have  made  considerable  improve- 
ments in  the  art  of  teaching  this  and  that, 
there  is  still  no  approach  to  a  general 
agreement  as  to  what  we  should  teach  or 
what  the  object  of  academic  training  should 
be.  We  are,  perhaps,  agreed  that  it  is 
good,  as  far  as  it  goes,  to  teach  "  practically 
useful "  things.  Thereabouts  our  agreement 
ceases.  Even  about  that  we  do  not  really 
agree  at  all.  The  claims  of  the  practically 
useful  conflict,  more  or  less,  with  the  claims 
of  education  of  the  other  sort ;  and  there 
can  be  no  real  agreement  till  these  claims 
are  adjusted.  But  with  "  technical  educa- 
tion" we  are  not  now  concerned  at  all. 
As  soon  as  we  pass  beyond  its  sphere  of 
influence  we  enter  chaos, — or,  at  least,  if 
that  be  exaggeration,  we  enter  a  region  in 
which  disagreement  is  far  more  positive  than 
agreement.  When  we  disagree  concerning 
the  ideals  of  education  in  the  larger  sense 
we  disagree  definitely  and  irreconcilably : 
when  we  agree  we  become  vague.  In  fact 
this   question,    Why    do   we   want   to   teach 


Of  Education.  1 1 3 

anything  ?  involving,  as  it  does,  this  other, 
What  do  we  want  to  teach  ?  is  really  of 
very  great  difficulty.  Perhaps,  after  all, 
we  shall  find  that  no  answer  is  possible. 

Yet  we  must  try  to  reach  some  kind  of 
answer,  and  to  that  end  we  had  best  begin 
by  narrowing  the  question.  We  must  be 
careful  not  to  make  it  too  narrow  or  we 
shall  find  we  have  not  room  enough  to 
stand.  But,  bearing  in  mind  that  our  main 
object  at  present  is  to  find  an  answer  to 
the  question,  Why  do  we  want  to  teach 
history  ?  and  that  the  teaching  of  history 
must  needs  be  scholastic,  wre  need  not  be 
thinking  of  education  in  the  largest  sense  : 
we  may  confine  our  view,  so  far  as  that 
is  possible,  to  scholastic  education. 
[  Scholastic  education  resolves  itself  into  the 
teaching  of  a  number  of  different  subjects 
by  persons  supposed  to  be  more  or  less 
specially  qualified  to  teach  them.  What- 
ever be  the  aim  of  the  teaching  as  a 
whole,  it  takes  the  form  of  instruction 
given    in    different    subjects.       One    of    the 

h 


1 1 4     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

subjects  so  taught  is  something  or  other 
called  "History."  Obviously,  before  we  can 
decide  how  best  to  deal  with  this  particu- 
lar subject,  we  must  have  a  clear  notion  of 
the  ideal  connection  of  all  the  subjects 
that  are  taught.  If  there  be  no  such  con- 
nection, if  there  be  no  definable  aim  of  all 
this  instruction  as  a  whole,  then,  indeed, 
our  question  has  no  answer.  In  that  case 
we  are  teaching  history,  as  we  are  teaching 
all  other  subjects,  because  it  is  the  custom 
to  do  so,  or  because  some  persons,  some- 
where, in  authority,  for  some  mysterious 
and  necessarily  insufficient  reason,  think  that 
it  ought  to  be  done. 

In  that  case  it  does  not  matter  what 
meaning  we  give  to  the  word  "  history "  or 
how  we  treat  the  subject,  so  long  as  these 
authorities  are  satisfied.  That  is  to  say 
that  it  does  not  matter  except  to  ourselves ; 
and  that  is  to  say  that  it  does  not  matter 
at  all. 

Already  we  are  in  danger  of  ambiguity. 
We   have   been    speaking    of   the    "  higher " 


Of  Education.  1 1 5 

education  as  though  it  were  a  simple  thing, 
and  even  as  though  it  were  concerned  only 
with  the  intellect.  But  we  cannot  narrow 
down  our  question  as  much  as  that.  Edu- 
cation must  needs  be  moral  as  well  as  in- 
tellectual, if  only  because  it  cannot  possibly 
avoid  being  both.  But,  however  close  may 
be  the  connection  in  reality  of  moral 
and  intellectual  training,  they  are  ideally 
separable,  and  for  the  sake  of  clearness  it 
will  be  best  to  separate  them.  For  the 
present  we  will  confine  our  attention  to 
the  question  of  the  education  of  the  intel- 
ligence merely. 

If  we  had  a  definite  system  of  education 
established  here  in  England,  if  we  had  even 
a  definite  theory,  however  unsystematised 
our  scholastic  apparatus  might  be,  there 
would  be  a  way  of  escape  from  our  diffi- 
culties. We  could  take  the  established 
theory  as  a  basis  and  refuse  to  question 
it.  Our  procedure  would  not  be  at  all 
philosophic ;  but  it  would  be  immediately 
practical.       As    things     are    we    are    in    no 


u6     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

danger;  for,  in  fact,  we  have  neither  system 
nor  theory.  Our  scholastic  apparatus  is  an 
unco-ordinated  jumble  of  institutions  new 
and  old,  working,  apparently,  on  different 
theories  as  to  the  end  in  view.  And  this 
unsystematised  system  is  rendered  the  more 
chaotic  by  the  interference  of  different  ex- 
amining boards  existing  for  different  sorts 
of  purposes,  and  by  the  interference  of  local 
authorities  and  even  of  religious  sects,  with 
purposes  only  partially  educational  or  not 
educational  at  all.  It  is  clear  that  we  can 
find  no  practicable  foothold  in  this  welter. 
The  thirteenth  century  may  be  said  to  have 
had  a  theory  of  education,  and  the  seven- 
teenth century  may  be  said  to  have  had 
a  theory.  We  have  fragments  of  conflicting 
systems.  The  old  systems  have  broken  down 
and  the  new  one  is  not  yet  made :  we 
are  trying  to  make  it.  Much  thought  and 
energy  is  being  given  to  the  work,  though, 
unfortunately,  a  good  deal  of  the  energy 
is  supplied  by  people  with  quite  uneduca- 
tional  ends  to  serve.     We  are  going  through 


Of  Education.  1 17 

the  throes  of  a  birth,  perhaps,  but  the 
conditions  are  not  entirely  healthy.  No 
one  knows  that  the  result  may  not  be  a 
thing  still-born,  or  a  thing  monstrous,  or  a 
thing  diseased. 

We  are  all  convinced  of  the  value  of  the 
higher  education,  and  not  one  of  us  knows 
what  this  higher  education  should  do.  But 
this  statement  is  false ;  we  are  not  all  con- 
vinced. Thousands  of  us,  I  should  rather 
say  millions  of  us,  are  not  convinced  that 
education  other  than  "technical"  has  any 
value  at  all.  And  there  is  no  hope  of 
these  millions  ever  being  convinced  until  we 
who  are  so  agree  about  the  main  things. 
Each  one  of  us  who  is  interested  in  the 
matter  must  think  the  thing  out  for  him- 
self. There  is  no  tradition,  there  is  no 
authority,  on  which  we  can  shuffle  off  our 
responsibility. 

We  agree,  one  may  suppose,  to  regard 
scholastic  education  as  having  for  its  end 
the  training  of  the  mind  and  the  imparting 
of  knowledge.      Training   is   intellectual,    or 


u8     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

it  is  moral,  or  it  is  aesthetic.  For  the 
sake  of  simplification  we  put  aside  for  the 
present  the  two  latter  kinds  of  training. 
What  do  we  want  our  schooling  to  do  for 
us  intellectually  ?  What  is  our  idea  of  an 
intellectually  thoroughly  educated  young 
person?  Must  the  outlines  of  that  young 
person  remain  for  ever  dim  ? 

It  is,  first  of  all,  a  question  of  essentials. 
It  is  mere  matter  of  necessity  that  we 
should  start  with  the  assertion  of  some  far- 
reaching  principle.  What  do  we  want  our 
schools  to  do  for  us  intellectually  ?  The 
question  is  surely  put  too  narrowly.  The 
question  rather  is,  What  do  we  want  our 
schools  to  do  not  for  us  but  for  humanity 
and  for  the  future  ?  And  to  the  question 
put  thus  there  seems  to  be  a  sort  of  answer. 
\We  want  our  schools  to  lay  for  the  next 
generation  the  foundations  of  sound  thinking. 

Possibly  no  one  is  more  painfully  aware 
than  the  present  writer  how  monstrously 
large  are  the  assumptions  implied  in  this 
assertion.     To  his  mind,   at  least,   it  implies 


Of  Education.  1 19 

that    sound   thinking    is   a   thing   absolutely 
necessary  for   the   final   salvation   of  human 
society.     It  implies  that  man  does  not   yet 
know  the  things  that   belong  to   his   peace. 
It   implies  that  a   right   educational   system 
will   be   concerned   somewhat    less   with   the 
actual  children  in  its  schools  than  with  their 
children  and  their  grandchildren.     All  these 
propositions    are   disputable,    and    it    is    im- 
possible to  discuss  them  here.     These  things 
must  be  assumed  for  the  moment  if  we  are 
to    make    any   further    headway,    and,    it    is 
to    be    feared,    others    also.     Even    to    state 
clearly  all  the  assumptions  involved  in  our 
proposition  as  to  the  end  of  scholastic  edu- 
cation on  its  intellectual  side  would  involve 
a  long  process.      On  the  other  hand,  if  we 
are  to  assume  nothing   it  is  certain  that  we 
shall   never    move    at    all.     The    assumption 
that  sound  thinking  is  the  right  end  of  the 
educational    process   on    its   intellectual   side 
has    a    fair    and    reasonable    appearance.     It 
may  be  disputed  or  even  disproved,   but  it 
seems  to  throw  the    burden   of  disproof  on 


1 20     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

the  other  side.  It  is  at  least  possible  that 
modern  Europe  may  come  in  time  to  accept 
it,  and,  practically,  it  seems  as  though  it 
might  provide  a  basis  for  an  educational 
system.  At  least  we  may  make  the  as- 
sumption as  a  working  hypothesis,  and  see 
where  it  will  take  us. 

It  is  clearly  a  question  of  training,  first 
of  all,  rather  than  of  knowledge.  How  do 
we  want  the  intelligence  to  be  trained  with 
a  view  to  sound  thinking?  Put  in  this 
way  the  question  does  not  seem  a  very 
difficult  one  to  answer.  We  cannot  make 
the  intellect  a  master,  but  we  want  to  make 
it  as  efficient  a  servant  as  it  can  be  for  all 
purposes,  and  especially  for  the  purpose  of 
thinking  its  way  through  the  difficulties  of 
humanity.  To  enable  it  to  become  this 
efficient  servant  we  must,  first  of  all,  secure 
for  it  fair  play.  Far  from  being  an  easy 
thing  to  do,  this  is  a  thing  that,  under 
present  conditions,  cannot  possibly  be  com- 
pletely done.  It  means  that  we  have  to 
try    to  free   the   intelligence    from   presump- 


Of  Education.  121 

tions  and  prejudices,  however  generated, 
and  from  all  conventional  modes  of  thought, 
as  such.  We  have  to  help  it  to  distinguish 
quite  clearly  between  what  it  knows  and 
what  it  does  not  know,  between  what  can 
be  in  some  sense  or  degree  demonstrated 
for  it  and  what  it  has  merely  been  told  to 
believe.  We  have  to  help  it  to  free  itself 
from  the  complex  entanglements  of  circum- 
stance—  to  free  itself  from  the  hypnotism 
of  surrounding  opinion.  We  have  to  lift 
it  out  of  its  habitual  plane.  Every  one 
starts  in  a  peculiar  mental  atmosphere  of 
his  own,  more  or  less  stuffy  and  unhealthy, 
and  the  elements  of  that  atmosphere  are 
the  opinions  or  mental  habits  of  the 
people  immediately  surrounding  him.  These 
close  him  in  as  barriers.  In  that  atmos- 
phere his  opinions  tend  to  form  automati- 
cally and  sub  -  consciously.  We  have  to 
break  down  those  barriers  and  let  in  fresh 
air.  It  will  be  hard  work.  Orthodoxies  of 
all  sorts,  class  interests  and  instincts,  social 
conventions,  parents  and  guardians,  fight  on 


122     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

the  other  side.     Only  let  us  know  what  we 
have  to  do. 

But  this  is  not  all.  Freedom  of  the  in- 
tellect involves  more  than  mere  emancipa- 
tion from  habit  and  early  associations.  It 
involves  honesty.  This  is  not  to  say  that 
a  person  intellectual^  emancipated  must 
needs  be  morally  honest.  There  is,  perhaps, 
not  any  reason  why  he  should  be ;  but  in- 
tellectual honesty  he  must  have.  Not  only 
must  he  never  wilfully  shut  his  eyes — that 
is  downright  lying — but  he  must  keep  them 
very  wide  open.  He  must  never  gloss  over 
difficulties,  or  allow  himself  the  anarchic 
licence  of  a  special  pleader.  He  must  never 
tell  himself  that  he  knows  what  he  does  not 
know.  It  is  not  a  question  of  what  he  tells 
other  people.  A  conscious  lie  told  to  other 
people,  so  long  as  it  is  fully  conscious,  will 
not  touch  the  freedom  of  his  intelligence 
unless,  at  least,  it  be  very  often  repeated. 
But  he  must  never  lie  to  himself,  nor  must 
he  tell  himself  half-truths.  He  will  have  to 
keep  a   sharp  watch  on  himself  to  see  that 


Of  Education.  1 23 

he  does  not,  for  the  brain  of  man  is  deceitful 
and  desperately  wicked. 

Yet  more  is  required.  The  intelligence 
must  be  freed,  as  far  as  possible,  from 
emotional  disturbance.  Emotional  disturb- 
ance arises  when  a  man  feels  his  whole  being 
concerned  in  the  question  he  is  considering. 
He  does  not  look  at  the  thing  with  his  in- 
telligence only;  he  looks  at  it  as  though 
he  were  part  of  it  and  becomes  excited.  It 
may,  indeed,  be  that  he  is  part  of  it. 
Nevertheless  we  want  to  detach  the  reason- 
ing powers  from  the  emotions,  and  from  all 
that  is  simply  personal.  We  want  to  train 
the  mind  to  approach  all  questions  as 
though  they  had  for  it  no  personal  bearing, 
and  that  whether  they  have  such  bearing 
or  no. 

This  emancipation  of  the  intelligence 
should,  it  seems,  be  the  primary  aim  of 
intellectual  training.  Other  things  will 
follow  and  go  along  with  that.  We  want 
to  develop  the  power,  and  equally  the  habit, 
of    thinking    in    averages,    in    maxima    and 


124     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

minima,  in  masses  and  in  centuries.  We 
want  to  develop  a  sense  of  the  interde- 
pendence of  all  branches  of  knowledge.  We 
want  a  sense  of  the  complexity  of  every 
question  needing  serious  consideration.  We 
want  to  develop  a  power  of  suspending 
judgment.  l  We  want  to  make  it  easy  and 
even  habitual  to  suspend  judgment. )/' We 
want  to  make  it  absolutely  impossible  to 
hold  opinions  based  on  grossly  insufficient 
knowledge  of  the  facts.  We  want  a  habit 
of  thinking  of  conclusions  as  more  or  less 
probable  rather  than  as  true  or  untrue. 
We  want  to  develop  a  realistic  imagination 
of  the  number  of  different  views  that  may 
be  held  on  almost  any  really  complex 
question.  We  want  a  logical  habit  and 
we  want  an  analytic  habit. 

All  this  seems  to  some  of  us  mere  matter 
of  course.  It  is,  perhaps,  of  some  special 
importance  to  note  that  we  want,  further, 
a  training  in  the  medium  and  means  of 
thought — that  is,  in  language.  We  have 
to  train  our   young  minds   in   the   use    and 


Of  Education.  125 

in  the  sense  of  words.  '.  Accurate  thinking 
and  the  accurate  use  of  words  must  needs 
go  together.  But  there  is  no  such  thing 
as  perfectly  accurate  use  of  words,  because 
the  great  mass  of  words  have  not  perfectly 
exact  meanings.  "Words  which  represent 
things  are  like  things  in  this,  that  they  are 
vague  at  their  edges.  It  is  not  a  matter 
of  their  being  frayed  by  use,  though  of 
course  this  happens  also.  In  truth  they 
have  no  absolute  outline.  They  shade  off 
into  each  other  as  things  do.  Because  of 
this  and  because  of  the  weight  of  associa- 
tion every  word  carries,  words  mean,  at 
best,  slightly  different  things  to  different 
minds.  We  want,  therefore,  to  fill  our 
young  minds  with  the  sense  of  this  elusive 
quality  of  words,  because  we  must  recognise 
the  inexactness  of  our  own  thought  before 
we  can  get  it  as  exact  as  it  may  be. 
The  study  of  language  will  help  us  greatly 
in  this  as  well  as  in  other  respects.  One 
language  supplements  another,  not  so  much 
by    providing    wholly    untranslatable    words 


126     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

as  by  bringing  out   the   non- equivalence  of 
roughly  equivalent  words. 

When  we  consider  how  far  from  perfect  in 
intellectual  freedom  and  honesty  even  the 
best  of  us  is,  we  may  be  inclined  to  declare 
that  these  demands  are  preposterous.  But 
we  can  demand  no  less ;  for  nothing  less 
will  in  the  long  -  run  serve.  To  set  the 
feet  of  our  children  on  the  way  of  intel- 
lectual freedom,  that  is  the  best  we  can 
hope  to  do,  but  we  must  try  to  do  that. 
We  are  an  ignorant,  untrained,  undisciplined 
generation.  But  we  are  not  all  of  us  so 
untrained  and  so  ignorant  as  not  to  see 
where  we  fail,  as  not  to  see  something  at 
least  of  what  it  is  our  children  require  to 
make  them  more  competent  than  we  are. 
The  future  lies  folded  in  them,  and  for 
us  they  are  the  future.  All  our  political 
questions,  all  our  social  questions,  relate 
to  them  and  are  for  them  to  answer. 
We  cannot  see  our  way  through  the 
tangle.  All  we  can  hope  to  do  is  to 
set    our    children    on   the    right    road.       We 


Of  Erfuca Hon .  127 

cannot  even  do  that,  but  we  may  make 
a  beginning.  The  difficulty  of  these  first 
steps  is  indeed  enormous.  It  is  not  so 
much  with  the  children  as  with  the  teachers. 
We  ourselves  are  the  difficulty.  The  teach- 
ing profession  has  to  become  a  priesthood, 
and  we  are  none  of  us  worthy,  no,  not  one. 
We  are  neither  honest  enough  nor  pure 
enough  for  this  work.  But  if  only  we  can 
recognise  what  we  have  to  do,  that  recogni- 
tion will  itself  be  the  first  step. 

We  have  said  the  least  that  can  be  said 
concerning  what  is  required  for  intellectual 
training,  and  we  come  now  to  the  question 
of  knowledge.  What  is  that  knowledge 
which  we  are  to  regard  as  part  of  the 
equipment  every  man  and  woman  now  needs 
as  a  foundation  for  sound  thinking  ?  The 
human  race  has  now  been  living  on  this 
planet  for  a  considerable  time,  and  there 
are  a  number  of  things  important  to  us  as 
intellectual  beings  about  which  we  have 
acquired  some  positive  knowledge.  Let  us 
put    the    matter    quite    broadly.       May    we 


1 28     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

not  say  that   we   want   our   youth   to    start 
by    knowing    where    they    are?      We    want 
them  to  start  with    at   least  a  clear  notion 
of  how  much  knowledge  of  vital  things  we 
possess.     We   want   them  to  start  equipped 
with  the  main    conclusions   that   have   been 
reached    about    these    things,   and   with   the 
main    implications    and    bearings     of    these 
conclusions    clearly   in   mind.      But    at    this 
point   some    one    will    ask,    "  What   are   the 
vital   things?"      The  question   has   an   ugly 
look,    but    some    sort    of    answer    must    be 
given.      There    are    people    who    will    say, 
"  This    and    that    are   the    only    vitally   im- 
portant  things,    and    about   them   we   know 
all  we  need  know."      And   there  are  others, 
perhaps,    who    will    say,    "  Yes,     these    are 
the  really  vital  things,   and  about  them  we 
know  nothing  whatever."     Need  we  concern 
ourselves  with  these  people?     We  certainly 
will    not    concern    ourselves    with    them   in 
this     place     if     we     can     help     it.       Yet 
perhaps    we    may   make    a    qualified    admis- 
sion   to    the   effect   that  this   also   we   have 


Of  Education.  1 29 

to    learn    precisely,    what    the    vital    things 
are. 

One  thing  is  certain :  that  we  cannot 
begin,  as  we  might  logically  wish  to  begin, 
with  the  very  groundwork  of  thought. 
There  is  just  this  objection  to  a  demand 
that  we  should  go  straight  to  the  heart  of 
things  and  begin  by  considering  pure  being, 
that  it  cannot  actually  be  done.  About 
ultimate  things  we  have  reached  no  con- 
clusion unless  it  be  a  conclusion  that  we 
can  know  nothing.  Will  any  one  say  that 
therefore  we  have  no  real  knowledge  at 
all?  In  a  sense  that  proposition  is  true. 
It  is  a  truth  that  concerns  us  as  intellectual 
beings,  but  it  is  not  a  truth  that  concerns 
directly  the  mass  of  the  activities  of  life 
or  of  thought.  It  is  to  this  mass  of  our 
vital  activities  that  education  has  to  be 
adjusted.  We  should  not  desire,  even  if  it 
were  possible  to  do  so,  to  educate  the 
intellect  into  a  condition  of  pure  intellectu- 
ality. 1  We  desire,  above  all,  to  educate  the 
intellect    as    an    instrument    of   thought    in 


130     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

our  vital  relations.  We  have  to  teach  it 
to  seek  and  to  apprehend  such  truth  as  it 
can  apprehend.  NWe  have  to  free  it  and 
to  purge  it  of  passion  and  of  superstition. 
We  have  to  widen  its  view  and  strengthen 
its  grip  as  much  as  possible,  because  such 
advance  as  man  can  make  will  depend, 
in  the  long-run,  mainly  on  its  strength 
and  its  lucidity.  Such  advance  is  in  no 
way  dependent  on  our  capacity  to  appre- 
hend the  ultimate. 

It  is  not,  of  course,  a  question  of  what 
any  particular  person  may  happen  to  want 
to  know.  It  is  not  a  question  of  any 
developed  and  individual  preference.  It  is 
a  question  of  what  man  as  an  intellectual 
and  as  a  social  being  requires  to  know. 
The  human  mind  is  engaged  in  the  ex- 
ploration of  the  universe.  It  is  seeking  to 
understand  its  own  relation  to  what  it  calls 
the  universe.  It  has  reached  certain  con- 
clusions about  its  own  place  in  nature,  and 
certain  notions  of  what  this  world  is,  what 
stuff  'tis  made  of,  whereof  it  is  born,  and  so 


Of  Education.  131 

on.  We  want  scholastically  to  teach  these 
things  to  our  young  people.  We  must  not 
teach  what  we  do  not  know,  but  we  must 
teach  the  most  far-reaching,  the  most  eman- 
cipating things  that  we  do  know.  Our 
young  people  want,  therefore,  some  at 
least  of  the  main  conclusions  and  implica- 
tions of  physics  and  chemistry,  geology, 
and  astronomy,  and  evolutionary  biology. 
They  want  a  clear  notion  of  the  surface 
of  this  planet,  and  of  the  working  of  wind 
and  rain  and  tide.  They  want  language 
and  mathematics,  mainly,  perhaps,  for  the 
sake  of  training  in  thought.  How  much 
in  each  case  they  will  require  of  these 
things  is  a  question  that  only  experience 
can  answer.  But  they  want  also,  I  think, 
history,  and  in  connection  with  history, 
Political  and  Social  Philosophy.  When  we 
have  equipped  our  youth  with  a  realisation 
of  what  all  this  signifies,  with  a  definite 
notion  not  only  of  conclusions  but  of  the 
manner  in  which  they  have  been  reached, 
and  when  we  have  trained  their  intelligence 


132     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

into  freedom  and  right  method,  then,  and 
not  till  then,  shall  we  be  able  fairly  to 
say  that  we  are  an  intellectually  educated 
people.  We  shall  have  laid  the  necessary 
foundations  for  sound  thinking. 

A  few  words  must  be  added  concerning 
the  question  of  what  moral  training  a  rightly 
organised  educational  system  would  give. 
The  question  cannot  be  ignored  by  any 
teacher.  Moral  training  is  inseparable  from 
intellectual  training,  and,  at  least  in  many 
subjects,  moral  teaching  is  inseparable  from 
instruction.  Every  human  deed  has  a  moral 
value,  and  in  every  little  reference  to  such 
deeds  lurks  a  moral  valuation.  The  teacher 
of  history  must  continually  be  dealing 
directly,  however  impersonally,  with  the 
moral  judgments  of  others.  Yet  it  is  only 
indirectly  that  the  teacher  of  history  as 
such  is  concerned  with  the  business  of  moral 
training,  and  we  are  not  therefore  bound, 
in  this  place,  to  consider  the  question  fully. 

Many  persons  appear  to  imagine  that 
while    grave    doubt    may    exist    as    to    the 


Of  Education.  133 

right  subjects  of  scholastic  instruction,  there 
can  be  no  serious  doubt  as  to  what  is  re- 
quired morally.  But  such  agreement  as 
actually  exists  on  this  question  appears  to 
be  merely  superficial.  We  are  really  agreed 
only  on  the  truism  that  it  is  a  useful  thing 
to  inculcate  useful  habits.  The  general  ques- 
tion is,  in  fact,  monstrously  difficult,  and 
any  theory  on  the  subject  involves  a 
philosophy  of  life.  We  know,  or  think  we 
know,  within  narrow  limits,  how  we  desire 
the  intelligence  to  be  trained  and  what 
is  the  knowledge  most  vital  for  thought. 
We  do  not  know  with  equal  accuracy  what 
moral  training  is  wanted.  Logical  process 
is  the  same  yesterday,  to-day,  and  for  ever. 
The  facts  of  nature  alter  not  at  all,  or  so 
slowly  that  the  human  mind  only  with 
effort  becomes  conscious  of  their  increasing 
change.  But  the  moral  standards  and  values 
of  that  mind  change  far  more  rapidly.  And 
not  only  do  they  change  with  the  genera- 
tions, but  they  vary  from  one  person  to 
another.      Humanity  is  not  at  present  ade- 


134     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

quate  to  any  coherent  system  of  moral 
training.  We  do  not  know  exactly  what 
we  want,  still  less  do  we  know  exactly 
what  the  future  requires  of  us.  In  the 
present  state  of  the  world,  at  least,  there 
is  not  one  best  moral  type  but  many  types 
that  are  fine,  and  many  more  than  we, 
perhaps,  are  inclined  to  recognise. 

Yet  we  are  not  in  utter  darkness,  and  we 
must  work  by  such  light  as  we  have.  We 
know  what  we  do  not  want  better,  perhaps, 
than  what  we  want ;  but  at  least  we  know 
something  of  both.  We  can  see  that  it 
is  mainly  a  question  of  training  the  imagin- 
ation,— a  very  delicate  business,  and  requiring 
a  great  honesty.  We  can  see  that  some 
mental  habits  are  healthy  and  others  un- 
healthy. |'We  believe  that  everything  that 
makes  for"  co-operation,  for  sympathy,  for 
self-respect,  and  for  respect  for  all  living 
things,  for  largeness  of  purpose  and  steadi- 
ness in  pursuit,  is  good.  We  are  sure  that 
everything  that  makes  for  personal  greed, 
for    sensuality   and    sloth,    for    pettiness    of 


Of  Education.  135 

purpose,  is  bad.  How  much  a  scholastic 
system  may  do  to  develop  the  good  and 
eliminate  the  evil  we  do  not  know,  for  we 
have  not  yet  tried. 

For  the  rest  we  can,  of  course,  inculcate 
useful  and  discourage  detrimental  habits. 
This  appears  to  be  what  most  people  are 
thinking  of  when  they  speak  of  moral  train- 
ing. But  this  is  merely  moral  training  on 
its  "technical"  side.  It  is,  strictly,  a  depart- 
ment of  technical  education.  It  is  a  training 
which  will  tend  to  enable  a  boy  or  a  girl  to 
"  get  on "  in  life,  and  just  so  far  as  this 
getting  on  is  represented  as  the  sufficient 
purpose  of  the  habit  inculcated,  the  training 
is  immoral  rather  than  positively  "  moral." 
The  habit  of  punctuality  is,  no  doubt,  an 
excellent  business  habit ;  but  its  inculcation 
as  such  is  certainly  no  part  of  the  higher 
educative  process. 

To  have  written  this  much  about  the 
intellectual  and  moral  aspects  of  education 
with  hardly  a  reference  to  aesthetics  is,  per- 
haps,   characteristically  English.      There  are 


136     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

those  who  would  say  that  training  of  the 
intellect  and  the  moral  sense  are  relatively 
unimportant,  and  important  chiefly  as  they 
subserve  aesthetic  training.  It  is  probably 
true  that  a  people  trained  and  educated 
intellectually,  and  rich  in  useful  moral  habits 
and  lucid  moral  notions,  but  lacking  in  a 
sense  of  aesthetic  values,  would  be  in  every 
sense  a  dull  people  and  in  all  the  highest 
things  a  sterile  people.  There  is  a  certain 
danger  here,  and  every  teacher  in  every 
subject  should  have  it  in  mind.  But  in  this 
place  only  two  things  need  be  said.  To 
begin  with,  it  is  certainly  better  not  to  follow 
the  example  of  the  Emperor  Joseph  II.  in 
trying  to  take  the  second  step  before  we 
have  taken  the  first.  And  finally,  the  ques- 
tion how  far  the  teacher  of  history  is  specifi- 
cally concerned  either  with  ethics  or  aesthetics 
is  a  question  to  be  considered  later. 


i37 


IX. 

OF  EDUCATIONAL  HISTORY. 

We  are  now,  at  last,  in  a  position  to  con- 
sider the  exact  place  of  history  in  our 
scheme  of  education.  What  amount  and 
what  kind  of  historical  knowledge  is  de- 
manded  for  the  young  mind  as  part  of  the 
basis  of  sound  thinking  which  our  educa- 
tional agencies  as  a  whole  should  combine 
to  supply  ?  Evidently,  in  speaking  thus  of 
the  "  young  mind,"  we  are  speaking  not  of 
the  child  of  fifteen  but  rather  of  the  37oung 
person  of  full  legal  age  or  thereabout. 
Quite  obviously  a  child  of  fifteen  cannot 
have  acquired  more  than  the  beginnings  of 
a  foundation  for  the  superstructure  of 
thought,  even  though,  if  the  educative 
process    stop    at    that   age,    the    foundations 


138     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

laid  may  be  sound  and  will  be  valuable  in 
proportion  to  the  goodness  of  their  material. 
Evidently,  too,  we  are  not  thinking  merely 
of  our  present  national  schools.  It  will 
take  all  the  time  of  all  our  scholastic 
apparatus,  up  to  and  including  the  universi- 
ties, adequately  to  lay  our  required  founda- 
tions. At  present  this  apparatus  does  not 
in  any  true  sense  constitute  a  system.  It 
will  have  to  be  made  into  one  before  any 
large  proportion  of  our  population  has  a 
chance  of  being  educated. 

The  question  how  the  teacher  of  history 
should  commence  his  share  of  the  work 
with  very  young  students  we  will  consider 
later.  The  larger  question  must  be  answered 
first.  In  this,  as  in  all  practical  matters, 
we  must  begin  by  thinking  not  of  the 
beginning  but  of  the  end.  For  the  begin- 
ning is  determined  by  the  end,  if  it  is  a 
beginning  of  anything. 

However  great,  in  this  or  that  respect, 
the  value  of  history  treated  as  pageant 
may    be,    it    seems    evident     that    it    is    a 


Of  Educational  History.       139 

scientific  view  of  history  that  is  needed  for 
intellectual  development.  This  conclusion 
can  hardly  be  escaped.  The  value  of  history 
as  pageant  must  needs  be  mainly  moral  or 
mainly  aesthetic.  The  instructional  teaching 
of  history  cannot  be  mainly  either.  It  is, 
therefore,  with  history  as  a  science  that 
our  schooling  must  be  primarily  concerned. 

What  sort  of  knowledge,  then,  of  the 
science  of  history  is  needed,  and  how  much  ? 
But,  clearly,  the  main  question  is  not  of 
how  much  detail  we  should  give,  here, 
there,  or  anywhere.  Detail,  as  such,  is  not 
needed  at  all.  It  is  a  question  of  main 
facts.  We  want  such  detail  as  will  help  the 
student  to  see  how  conclusions  are  reached 
and  what  they  mean.  We  want  details  as 
an  aid  to  imagination.  We  have  to  force 
the  student  to  realise  that  at  every  point  he 
is  dealing  with  real  life  and  to  realise  how 
much  is  involved  in  every  generalisation. 
We  shall  need,  in  fact,  a  deal  of  detail.  But 
to  cram  into  the  young  mind  a  mass  of  min- 
ute knowledge  concerning    any    one    matter 


140     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

or  period  can  be  no  part  of  the  general 
educative  process.  And  we  certainly  do  not 
want  a  lot  of  little  facts  and  dates  conven- 
tionally assumed  to  possess  some  mysterious 
importance.  We  have  no  time  for  irrelevant 
detail.  Nor  do  we  need  little  facts  with  a 
merely  picturesque  quality.  Everywhere 
and  always  we  need  things  of  value  for 
thought. 

The  study  of  history  is  capable  of  stimu- 
lating, of  widening  and  assisting  thought 
in  many  ways,  but  it  has,  it  may  be  sup- 
posed, a  particularly  direct  bearing  on  such 
thinking  as  is  devoted  to  matters  social 
and  political.  We  must  not,  indeed,  teach 
history  primarily  with  a  view  to  throw- 
ing light  on  such  matters.  That  is  one  of 
the  things  we  have  most  carefully  to  avoid 
doing.  We  must  keep  close  to  the  actual 
facts  and  the  actual  factors  of  the  great 
historic  process.  We  must,  in  actual  teach- 
ing, think  of  the  process  itself,  first  and  last. 
Nevertheless,  in  arranging  our  ideal  historical 
curriculum  it  is  only  reasonable  to  keep  in 


Of  Educational  History.       141 

mind  the  fact  that  knowledge  of  the  historic 
process  bears  upon  social  and  political 
questions  more  directly  than  upon  anything 
else.  For  this  reason,  and  also  because  of 
our  relative  ignorance  in  other  departments, 
it  will  be  reasonable  to  take  the  history  of 
our  European  civilisations  as  in  the  main 
our  subject  for  teaching.  Yet  certainly  no 
young  person  should  be  allowed  to  grow  up 
in  total  ignorance  of  the  Stone  Age  or  of 
the  great  civilisations  that  grew  and  decayed 
before  Rome  was.  The  young  mind  should 
acquire  a  notion  of  these  things  as  a  back- 
ground for  his  studies  of  the  later  European 
history.  They  should,  at  least,  loom  up 
for  him,  a  little  shadowy  and  indistinct  but 
quite  real,  at  the  far  end  of  his  vista. 

European  history  it  must  needs  be  if  only 
in  the  main  outlines ;  we  cannot  possibly  do 
with  less.  It  is  only  because  of  a  confusion 
of  technical  training,  with  mental  training 
in  the  larger  sense,  that  any  one  ever 
imagined  that  it  was  enough  for  an  English- 
man   to   know  something   of  the   history  of 


142     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

England.  But  did  any  one  ever  actually 
imagine  this  to  be  true?  The  old  notion, 
which  still  remains  as  a  curious  survival, 
seems  to  have  been  that  an  Englishman 
should  know  something  of  the  history  of 
England  and  something  of  that  of  ancient 
Greece  and  Eome.  It  would  have  been 
hard  to  say  why  he  should  study  things  in 
this  discontinuous  fashion.  But  the  history 
of  Greece  and  of  Rome  seems  to  have  been 
regarded  as  a  sort  of  adjunct  to  the  study 
of  the  classical  languages  and  literatures. 
Actually,  of  course,  the  study  of  languages 
and  literatures  is  a  specialised  branch  of 
history. 

This  antiquated  view  of  the  use  of  history 
as  an  educational  instrument  seems,  in  fact, 
to  involve  an  assertion  that  history,  as  we 
now  understand  it,  is  not  a  proper  subject 
for  teaching  at  all.  Yet  it  would  perhaps 
be  better  to  keep  to  the  older  system  rather 
than  to  teach  English  history  and  that  only. 
"A  man,"  people  vaguely  say,  "ought  to 
know  something  of  the  history  of  his  own 


Of  Educational  History.       143 

country."  This  proposition  we  do  not  deny, 
but  we  doubt  whether  he  will  ever  know 
anything  worth  knowing  about  it  if  he 
knows  nothing  of  European  development  as 
a  whole.  For  the  real  fact  is  that  no 
country  has  a  history  of  its  own  at  all,  and 
there  is  no  more  such  a  thing  as  English 
history  than  there  is  such  a  thing  as  the 
Atlantic  Ocean.  Or  are  we  to  teach  "  English 
history"  with  the  object  of  inculcating  patri- 
otism ?  On  this  it  may  be  remarked  that 
whether  the  scientific  study  of  English  his- 
tory will  tend  to  develop  patriotism  is  very 
dubious.  The  teaching  of  English  history 
definitely  from  a  patriotic  point  of  view  is, 
of  course,  a  thing  not  to  be  tolerated.  No 
procedure  could  be  less  scientific,  and  per- 
haps no  point  of  view  is  more  distorting. 
There  has  been,  in  the  past,  a  great  deal  of 
this  kind  of  thing.  The  struggle  between 
England  and  Napoleon,  for  instance,  has 
been  fairly  consistently  represented  as  a 
struggle  between  good  and  evil,  —  Castle- 
reagh  and  Wellington  representing  the  good 


144     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

principle  and  Napoleon  the  powers  of  dark- 
ness. Nonsense  of  that  kind  is  likely  to 
be  the  result  of  looking  at  the  historic  pro- 
cess from  a  patriotic  point  of  view ;  and 
it  is  worse  than  nonsense,  because  falsehood 
never  ends  with  itself.  You  will,  if  you 
are  not  very  careful,  find  yourself  engaged 
in  the  cultivation  of  a  whole  scrub  of  rank 
illusions.  But  if  you  are  really  very  care- 
ful, then  you  will  find  that,  perhaps 
insensibly,  you  abandon  the  patriotic  point 
of  view  altogether. 

It  may  further  be  pointed  out  that  the 
inculcation  of  patriotism  is  a  department 
of  moral  training,  not  of  intellectual  train- 
ing. Indeed,  if  it  be  educative  at  all,  it 
should  perhaps  be  considered  as  a  depart- 
ment of  technical  education.  Patriotism,  it 
is  to  be  supposed,  counts  as  a  practically 
useful  virtue  from  a  social,  or  rather  from  a 
national,  point  of  view.  If  the  nation  needs 
to  teach  it  as  such  it  will  probably  do  so, 
but  it  is  not  the  business  of  the  teacher  of 
history. 


Of  Educational  History.       1 45 

For  all  this  it  does  seem  that,  practically, 
we  must  teach  more  about  the  history  of 
the  English — that  is,  of  ourselves — than 
about  the  history  of  other  peoples.  To  take 
European  history  simply  as  our  subject,  and 
pay  equal  attention  to  all  the  greater 
European  movements  and  peoples,  would 
perhaps  be  to  demand  more  of  our  teachers 
than  we  can  reasonably  expect  ever  to  get. 
A  possibly  more  serious  objection  is  that  if 
we  adopt  this  course  we  shall  be  in  danger 
of  not  getting  close  enough  to  the  facts 
anywhere.  We  should  have  to  spread  our 
detail  thinly  over  a  very  wide  surface.  We 
should  be  in  danger  of  teaching  a  series 
of  wide  generalisations,  accompanied  by  no 
such  amount  of  detail  anywhere  as  would 
suffice  to  vivify  them  to  the  young  imagina- 
tion. Unless  we  give  our  pupils  an  imagina- 
tively realistic  grasp  of  the  matter  taught, 
we  shall  achieve  little  or  nothing  of  value. 
Therefore,  while  we  try  to  give  an  idea  of 
the  main  features  of  European  development 
we  must   give   a  considerably  more  detailed 

K 


146     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

account  of  the  features  of  specifically  English 
development.  We  may  be  sure  that  the 
greater  detail  given  in  this  connection  will 
help  to  make  real  for  the  imagination  our 
generalisations  concerning  the  rest  of  Europe. 

It  is  possible,  indeed,  that  the  time  is  not 
far  off  when  we  shall  refuse  to  be  content 
with  anything  less  than  a  study  of  the  main 
European  movements,  and  shall  refuse  to 
dwell  especially  upon  anything  save  in  pro- 
portion to  its  importance  for  Europe  at  large. 
It  may  be  that  the  present  writer's  sense  of 
difficulty  in  dealing  adequately  for  educa- 
tional purposes  with  European  history  as  a 
whole  is  determined  or  exaggerated  by  some 
secret  bias.  It  is  so  natural  to  find  that  the 
historjr  of  ourselves  is  more  significant  than 
the  history  of  other  people.  Yet  it  can 
hardly  be  denied  that,  in  a  sense,  it  actually 
is  so.  Up  to  a  certain  point,  and  especially 
for  beginners,  it  is  more  significant  because 
it  is  more  easily  intelligible  and  more  easily 
led  up  to. 

On  the  whole,  then,  reckoning  details,  most 


Of  Educational  History.       1 47 

of  the  history  we  shall  teach  as  part  of  the 
ordinary  pass  curriculum,  as  it  were,  will  have 
to  be  English  in  some  sense  or  degree.  But 
we  must  teach  our  pupils  to  see  the  whole 
development  of  English  life  in  relation  to  the 
life  of  Western  Europe  generally.  All  our 
laws,  all  our  institutions  are  but  specialised 
forms  of  the  laws  and  institutions  which  arose 
in  Europe  on  the  union  of  the  German  bar- 
barians with  the  wreck  of  the  Roman  Empire. 
The  significance  and  the  proportions  of  any 
English  development  can  only  be  seen  when 
it  is  compared  with  analogous  developments 
elsewhere.  To  look  at  our  modern  parlia- 
mentary system  does  not  really  help  us 
to  understand  the  parliamentary  system  of 
Edward  I.'s  time ;  but  we  shall  be  helped 
by  looking  at  the  States  General  of  contem- 
porary France. 

The  essential  thing  is  that  the  young  mind 
should  be  trained  to  think  of  European,  or 
at  least  of  West  European,  history  as  of  a 
single  great  complex  growth  or  process,  and 
to  think  of  English  history  as  a  special  case, 


148     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

only  ideally  separable  from  the  rest.  The 
English  people  itself  it  must  learn  to  think 
of  as  a  thing  partly  but  never  for  a  moment 
perfectly  detached,  even  at  its  period  of 
greatest  isolation.  For  England  was  and 
remains  a  detached  portion  of  the  Roman 
Empire. 

It  would  be  quite  useless  to  endeavour,  in 
this  place,  to  make  out  an  ideal  course  of 
historical  study  in  any  detail.  To  do  that 
must  be  the  work  of  experience.  But  we  can 
make  our  statement  of  what  has  to  be  taught 
rather  more  precise  than  it  is  so  far.  Chron- 
ologically speaking,  we  shall  have  to  begin 
if  not  with  Greece,  then  with  Rome.  Cer- 
tainly our  young  people  ought  not  to  grow 
up  in  total  ignorance  of  that  Athenian  civil- 
isation which,  if  not  definitely  superior  to, 
strikes  one  as  having  been  so  much  more 
mature  than  our  own.  But  while  we  West 
Europeans  are  only  collateral  heirs  of  Athens, 
we  are  the  direct  heirs  of  Rome.  So  of  Rome 
we  must  know  more.  We  do  not  want 
legends  or  details,  but  we  want  a  notion   of 


Of  Educational  History.       149 

the  transformations  of  the  Roman  Republic, 
a  notion,  precise  and  general,  of  the  exten- 
sion of  Roman  dominion  and  of  what  it 
signified,  some  notion,  at  least,  of  what  was 
involved  in  the  great  struggle  with  Carthage, 
and  a  notion  of  how  the  Roman  Republic 
developed  into  the  Empire.  All  this  we 
want  in  outline  only,  but  in  vivid  outline. 
Roman  history,  as  it  was  taught,  and  as 
unhappily  it  still  is  taught,  was  apt  to  stop 
at  the  death  of  Julius  Csesar.  But  for  the 
general  purposes  of  education  not  only  must 
it  not  stop  there,  but  it  should,  probably, 
become  rather  more  detailed  from  that  point 
onward.  We  need  a  fairly  distinct  notion 
of  the  structure  and  composition  of  the 
Empire,  of  its  theory  and  of  the  nature 
and  main  principles  of  its  law.  We  want 
a  distinct  notion  of  the  radical  differences 
between  its  civilisation  and  our  own.  We 
want,  at  least,  some  definite  ideas  as  to  the 
causes  of  its  decline  and  the  overwhelming 
disaster  of  its  dissolution.  We  need,  also, 
distinct   notions  of  the   development  within 


150     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

it  of  the  Christian  Church,  of  its  ideas  and 
tendencies,  and  of  its  position  in  the  last 
days  of  the  officially  Christian  Empire.  In 
the  chaotic  welter  that  follows  we  must  not 
lose  sight  of  the  code  of  Justinian  and  his 
destruction  of  the  East  Gothic  kingdom  in 
Italy,  which,  perhaps,  practically  saved  for 
us  the  Koman  law.  But  of  the  barbaric 
welter  itself  we  need  only  the  barest  out- 
lines, and  are  indeed  hardly  in  a  position 
to  give  more.  Yet  we  need  a  distinct 
notion  of  the  great  racial  drifts  and  settle- 
ments  of  which  the  British  conquests  of 
Saxons  and  Angles  is  but  a  small  item. 
And  we  want  a  notion  of  the  growth  of 
the  readjusted  Church,  and  of  barbaric 
monarchy,  and  of  feudalism.  We  must 
watch  the  young  nations  forming,  aggre- 
gating, and  drifting  apart. 

It  would  be  useless  to  continue  in  this 
chronological  fashion.  At  every  stage  of 
the  process  we  need  a  realistic  idea  of  the 
great  formative  movements.  We  must  fix 
our  minds   on   economic   conditions,    on   the 


Of  Educational  History.       1 5 1 

distribution  of  wealth  and  its  results  upon 
class  divisions  and  upon  government,  on  the 
growth  of  trade  and  of  towns.  We  must 
watch  the  evolution  of  law  and  of  govern- 
mental agencies.  We  must  think  of  such 
institutions  and  of  forms  of  government  in 
relation  to  their  economic  and  social  bases 
and  in  relation  to  the  ideas  that  dominate 
them  or  that  they  express.  We  must  note 
the  growing  self-consciousness  of  states,  and 
of  the  struggle  between  them  and  the 
economic  or  other  grounds  of  that  conflict. 
We  need  to  know,  at  least  roughly,  how  it 
was  that  at  the  end  of  the  Middle  Ages 
England  and  France  and  Spain  had  strong 
and  growing  national  monarchies,  while  Ger- 
many and  Italy  were  still  helplessly  divided. 
We  must  trace  the  struggle  for  dominion 
and  exploitation  of  the  world  beyond 
Europe  that  began  with  the  first  realisation 
of  that  world  and  is  going  on  at  this 
moment. 

In   dealing   with    specifically   English   his- 
tory we  can  only  proceed  on  the  same  lines, 


152     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

being  careful  to  establish  connections  at 
every  possible  point  with  our  account  of 
Europe  in  general.  It  is  a  question  of  the 
essence  of  the  matter ;  of  the  really  big 
things.  What  are  these  ?  Take  any  dif- 
ferentiated state  you  please — take  the  king- 
dom of  England  at  any  one  moment — what 
are  the  most  essential  features  of  its  being, 
and  those,  therefore,  which  it  is  the  main 
business  of  history  to  trace  ?  An  attempt  to 
state  them  in  a  logical  order  would  be  vain, 
for  not  only  do  they  co-exist,  but  they  are 
only  ideally  separable.  We  would  put  first 
of  all  the  economic  condition  of  the  state. 
We  must  consider  the  nature  of  the  state's 
wealth,  how  it  is  getting  its  living,  and  who 
are  its  customers,  if  it  has  any.  We  must 
study  the  distribution  of  that  wealth  within 
the  state,  and  very  carefully.  In  no  very 
long  run  this  will  be  found  to  involve  the 
class  divisions  which  exist  within  it.  In 
this  connection,  also,  the  system  of  land- 
ownership  is  often  of  the  greatest  import- 
ance, and  this  brings  us  to  the  law  of  real 


Of  Educational  History.       153 

property.  Secondly,  we  would  point  to  the 
governmental  arrangements  of  the  state, 
which,  we  shall  find,  are  more  or  less  closely 
connected  with  the  distribution  of  wealth 
within  it.  In  this  connection  we  must  be 
careful  not  to  be  deceived  by  formalists  or 
by  lawyers  who,  mayhap,  will  tell  us  many 
things  that  are  only  true  in  a  technical 
sense.  We  must  distinguish  between  the 
real  and  the  technical  constitution.  Very 
important,  also,  is  it  that  we  should  under- 
stand the  state's  theory  of  itself,  the  political 
philosophy  that  dominates  it  or  is  expressed 
in  its  constitution.  Further,  in  the  closest 
connection  with  the  governmental  constitu- 
tion we  have  to  consider  the  whole  legal 
system  of  the  state,  and,  in  the  largest 
sense,  its  police  system.  Then  come  the 
means  of  the  state  for  defence  and  for 
aggression,  resting  mainly  on  the  mass  of 
its  population  and  wealth.  We  must  study 
its  military  system,  and  its  relation  to 
foreign  states,  and  this  will  probably  again 
bring    us    to    economic    conditions.     Finally, 


154     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

there  falls  to  be  considered  the  intellectual 
and  moral  standpoint  and  condition  of  the 
people,  and  this  will  include  its  religion. 
We  are  speaking  of  our  imaginary  state  as 
though  it  were  homogeneous ;  but  if  racial 
lines  of  division  exist  within  it,  or  if  one 
part  of  the  country  have  a  different  law 
from  the  rest,  or  special  governmental  ar- 
rangements, this  is  likely  to  be  a  very  im- 
portant feature  in  the  constitution  of  the 
state. 

Our  summary  does  not  pretend  to  be  ex- 
haustive in  any  sense,  but  it  is  these  things 
above  all  upon  which  we  must  fix  attention 
in  dealing  with  the  history  of  England,  or 
of  any  other  country.  In  dealing  with 
events  there  should  seldom  be  much  doubt 
as  to  what  is  of  the  first  importance.  A 
mechanical  invention  may  be  so ;  the  life- 
history  of  a  king  can  hardly  be.  The  im- 
portant is  that  which  endures,  or  that  of 
which  the  traceable  effects  endure  from 
generation  to  generation — that  is,  for  some 
considerable    time.     The  important    event  is 


Of  Educational  History.       1 55 

that   which   appears  to  affect  the  course   of 
change  in  some  definite  direction. 

How  much  detail  we  can  give  either  in 
connection  with  English  or  with  European 
history  is  mainly  a  question  of  time.  Other 
things  being  equal,  the  more  the  better. 
But  before  we  can  answer  this  question  of 
quantity  we  must  know  how  much  language, 
how  much  physics,  how  much  biology,  and 
so  on,  have  to  be  taught.  It  will  require 
much  experiment,  and,  measured  by  any 
individual  life,  it  will  take  a  long  time  to 
give  a  satisfactory  answer  to  the  question. 


15^ 


X. 


OF  THE  EDUCATIONAL  VALUE 
OF  HISTORY. 

To  the  question,  what  kind  and  amount  of 
historical  knowledge  is  required  for  educative 
purposes,  a  rough  and  generalised  answer  has 
been  given.  We  must  now  consider  more 
definitely  than  we  have  yet  done  how  such 
a  course  of  study  as  has  been  roughly 
sketched  would  assist  in  the  laying  of 
foundations  for  sound  thinking. 

Throughout  such  a  course  of  study  we 
should  be  dealing  incessantly  with  the  action 
of  masses,  whether  as  states  or  as  classes  or 
as  political  "parties."  We  ought  to  obtain 
approximately  accurate  notions  of  the  nature 
of  their  action.  Roughly  speaking,  the 
action    of   masses    is    determined    partly   by 


Educational  Value  of  History.     157 

motives  of  what  is  called  self-interest — that 
is,  by  personal  desires  of  various  kinds,  and 
partly  by  various  forms  of  idealism,  con- 
structive or  destructive  or  simply  conserva- 
tive in  tendency,  as  the  case  may  be.  We 
ought  to  obtain  a  tolerably  clear  and 
accurate  notion  of  the  relation  between  these 
two  sets  of  factors  and  of  their  relative 
values.  In  this  way,  too,  we  should  obtain 
a  fairly  accurate  notion  of  the  nature  of 
inter -state  conflicts  and  of  the  causes  of 
war.  Further,  we  should  be  forced  in  some 
degree  to  realise  the  complex  ways  in  which 
law  and  institutions  grow  and  change,  the 
complex  ways  in  which  religions  are  trans- 
formed and  moral  standards  altered.  We 
should  reach  a  distinct  sense  of  the  inter- 
connection of  all  social  phenomena, — of  the 
bearing,  for  instance,  of  economic  facts  upon 
standards  of  morality  and  the  claims  of  the 
churches.  On  all  these  matters  the  science 
of  history,  as  it  advances,  will  attain  more 
and  more  accurate  notions ;  but  already  the 
study   of  history   should   at   least    give   one 


1 58     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

conclusions  approximately  correct.  If  history 
be  treated  from  a  scientific  point  of  view 
the  attainment  of  approximately  correct 
notions  on  these  matters  is  certain,  and  no 
system  of  history  -  teaching  that  did  not 
look  to  such  results  would  be  worth  any- 
thing. It  is  not  a  matter  of  European 
history  only.  The  more  fundamental  of  our 
generalisations  concerning  European  history 
will  apply,  more  or  less  accurately,  to  those 
great  tracts  of  historic  evolution  of  which 
we  know  little  or  nothing  directly.  Our 
notion  of  man's  social  evolution  as  a  whole 
cannot  fail  to  be  enriched  and  made  more 
precise  by  knowledge  of  the  history  of 
Europe. 

From  our  study  of  European  history  there 
should  also  finally  emerge  a  very  profound 
sense  at  once  of  the  unity  of  human  life 
through  all  generations  and  of  the  abso- 
lute continuity  of  change.  The  essentially 
gradual  character  of  that  continuous  change 
will  also,  it  may  be  added,  become  more 
and  more  apparent.     We  need  and  we  shall 


Educational  Value  of  History.     1 59 

get  the  sense  of  a  vast  growth  continuing, 
of  a  connected  mass  of  being,  continuously, 
inevitably,  gradually  changing  from  moment 
to  moment. 

A  too  exclusive  study  of  history  might 
possibly  result  in  an  exaggerated  sense  of 
the  instability  of  things  human.  The 
student,  it  might  be,  would  seem  to  him- 
self to  be  living  in  a  world  where  nothing 
is  at  all,  a  world  where  what  he  calls  his 
thoughts  are  but  a  phase  of  the  thought 
of  some  other  being,  where  his  personal 
action  has  no  significance  save  for  some 
future  which  is  not  his.  In  this  mood  he 
would  remember  with  a  shock  that  that 
future,  when  it  comes,  will  be  equally  so 
transitory  as  to  be  unreal.  Yet  to  such 
a  mood  as  this  history  itself  supplies  a  cor- 
rective, since  it  tells  of  continuity  as  well 
as  of  change.  But  there  will  certainly 
emerge  and  remain  a  profound  sense  of  the 
instability  of  all  the  most  apparently  estab- 
lished things.  This  sense  is  of  high  value 
for    thought.       It    saves    one    from     bein^ 


160     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

hypnotised  by  the  crude  self-assertion  of 
the  dominant.  To  remember,  to  know  al- 
ways that  all  the  solid -looking,  triumphant, 
awe-inspiring  things — Church  and  State  and 
nationality,  thrones,  dominions,  and  princi- 
palities— are  but  passing  phases  of  a  process, 
is  to  have  grasped  an  emancipating  fact. 

If  our  conception  of  man's  evolution  as 
a  whole  becomes  more  accurate  and  more 
justly  proportioned  through  the  study  of 
history,  this  cannot  fail  to  have  an  im- 
portant effect  on  all  the  larger  speculations 
in  which  we  may  indulge.  The  study  of 
history  is  or  may  be  one  of  the  avenues 
of  approach  to  that  synthetic  philosophy  of 
the  universe  as  it  touches  man's  under- 
standing, which  is  the  final  goal  of  the 
intellect.  There  are  many  such  avenues, 
and  this  is  one  of  them.  It  does  not  go 
the  whole  way,  and  it  is  not  a  short  cut. 
None  of  them  go  the  whole  way,  and  there 
are  no  short  cuts. 

Putting  the  larger  speculation  aside,  it  is 
quite  clear  that  any  real  knowledge  of  history 


Educational  Value  of  History.     161 

should  help  us  with  all  those  speculations 
and  inquiries  which  turn  upon  matters  social 
and  political.  Such  knowledge  should  enable 
us  finally  to  rid  ourselves  of  many  supersti- 
tions,—  of  modern  superstitions  concerning 
authorities  and  majorities  as  well  as  of 
antique,  surviving  superstitions  concerning 
nobility  and  claims  of  right.  It  will  help  us 
to  reckon  progress  from  the  Stone  Age  instead 
of  from  the  day  before  yesterday.  It  will 
help  us  to  separate  the  idea  of  progress  from 
the  idea  of  mechanical  achievement  and  from 
any  particular  forms  of  progress  which  happen 
to  be  immediately  familiar  to  us.  It  will 
assist  in  altogether  destroying  the  ludicrous 
superstition  of  our  own  immense  superiority 
as  compared  with  those  who  have  gone 
before.  It  should  assist  us  in  dealing  with 
the  churches  and  their  various  claims.  It 
should  help  us  in  dealing  with  all  ethical 
questions.  It  will  show  us  institutions  in 
the  light  of  their  origin.  It  will  take 
us,  to  some  extent,  behind  the  scenes  of 
current    politics.      I    do    not   mean   that  it 

L 


1 62     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

will    let    us    into    the    futile    secrets    and 
intrigues  of  politicians  beyond  the  reach  of 
the  press.     These  are  not  worth  the  knowing. 
But  it   will    teach   us  to  look  for,   and   will 
help    us'  to    see    class    interests    and    party 
interests   behind    all    the    talk    about   rights 
and  wrongs^     It  will  set  all  claims  of  right 
before  us  in  the  light  of  all  the  old  claims 
that    are    dead    and    all    but    forgotten.      It 
should   help  us  to  see   all  social  facts  in  a 
due   proportion ;    to   see   parliamentary   pro- 
ceedings in  their  real  relation  to  the  great 
continuous    movement    that    goes    on    apart 
from    politics.       It    should    help    us    to    see 
government     as     a    power    of     interference 
rather    than    as    a    creative    power.       And 
through  the   mental  training   obtained   from 
the    study    of    history    on    right    lines    we 
ought   to   be   able   to   approach   all   political 
and    social    questions    with    at    least    some 
degree     of     intellectual    detachment.        Our 
training    should   at   least    help   us   to    think 
of  such  questions  without  petty  and  irrele- 
vant passion.      Our  knowledge   should  give 


Educational  Value  of  History.     163 

us  a  sense  of  the  insignificance  of  our  own 
particular  interests,  and  help  us  to  see  in 
these  questions  a  reference  to  something 
larger  than  our  own  lives  and  larger  than 
the  lives  of  all  our  contemporaries  of  a 
moment.  Our  training  and  our  knowledge 
should  make  impossible  for  us  the  ludicrous 
assumption  that,  of  two  parties  in  the 
state,  one  is  actuated  by  the  highest 
motives,  by  lofty  public  spirit  and  care 
for  the  oppressed,  and  the  other  by  motives 
merely  greedy  and  mean  and  self-regard- 
ing. The  frequency  with  which  such  an 
assumption  as  this  is  met  with  in  our 
present  political  conflicts  is  one  of  the 
surest  signs  of  our  general  lack  of  a  decent 
education.  When  we  have  reached  intel- 
lectual freedom  and  honesty,  and  know  what 
we  do  not  know,  and  refuse  to  deceive  our- 
selves with  half-truths,  and  when  we  have 
realised  the  difficulty  of  all  these  questions, 
then  only  shall  we  be  able  to  adopt  a  sane 
point  of  view  in  regard  to  them. 

It    may,    indeed,    be   said   with    assurance 


164     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

that,   altogether   apart   from   the   acquisition 

of     knowledge,     history     affords      excellent 

training  -  ground    for    the    mind.      There    is 

no    mental    discipline    more    liberating   than 

the   being    forced    to    realise    a    multiplicity 

of  points   of  view,    and   to    realise,    further, 

how     largely     opinion     is     determined     by 

circumstance.       These    things    history   forces 

us    incessantly    to    do.       Mathematics    takes 

us  into  a  world   of  pure   reason,    and   it   is 

good  to  be  there ;  but  that  world  is  so  far 

removed    from    the    human    world    that    we 

may  spend  much  time  in  it  and  never  bring 

back    intellectual    freedom.      History    keeps 

us  in   the   human    world   and   yet   takes   us 

altogether    away     from     our     circumstantial 

surroundings.       It     tends,     thus,     to     break 

down  the  barriers  which  these  surroundings 

build     against     our    progress.      Again,    any 

serious     effort     to    reach    or    to    apprehend 

historical    truth    imposes    on   us   intellectual 

honesty    for    the    time    being,    forces    us    to 

think  in  masses,  in  averages,  and  centuries, 

forces    on     us     a     sense     of    the     extreme 


Educational  Value  of  History.     165 

complexity  of  every  social  phenomenon, 
forces  on  us  a  habit  of  weighing  evidence 
and  of  suspending  judgment,  compels  us  to 
analyse  and  to  be  logical,  and  constantly  to 
endeavour  to  draw  a  sharp  line  between 
what  we  know  and  what  we  do  not 
know. 

We  are  brought  up  by  the  idea  of  a 
possible  objection.  "Would  our  course  of 
history  prove  dull  to  the  taught?  To  the 
dull  all  things  are  dull ;  but  that  is  not 
the  question.  Would  it  be  dull  to  the 
average  mind  in  the  long-run  ?  Are  we 
assuming,  as  a  basis  for  our  teaching,  an 
intellectuality  that  does  not  exist?  There 
is  drudgery  and  drag  in  all  learning :  but 
it  is  not  a  question  of  any  occasional  or 
local  dulness.  Again,  it  may  be  pointed 
out  that  at  present  the  human  mind  is 
inclined  to  rebel  against  any  training  or 
instruction  which  does  not  seem  of  direct 
practical  usefulness.  The  charge  of  dulness 
is  likely  to  be  brought  against  any  subject 
the    end    of   the    teaching   of  which   is    not 


1 66     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

immediately  obvious.  It  is  likely  to  be 
brought  not  so  much  by  scholars  as  by 
uneducated  parents.  The  demand  for  merely 
technical  education  is  enormously  strong. 
But  this  is  simply  a  thing  that  we  have  to 
fight.  The  intellect  is  there :  our  business  is 
to  educate  it  into  intellectuality.  Rebellion 
against  intellectual  training  is  a  thing  to 
which  no  quarter  must  be  given.  There 
is  a  notion  abroad  that  education  should 
be  a  pleasant  process.  So,  indeed,  it  should, 
and  it  is  for  us  to  make  it  so.  But  it  must 
not  be  made  so  by  any  concessions  to  the 
adversary.  There  exists  a  certain  tendency 
towards  the  development  of  a  school  in 
which  work  has  become  play  and  play  work, 
in  which  learning  is  cultivated  in  a  gentle- 
manly manner,  so  far  as  cricket  allows, 
in  which  the  boys  are  provided  with  hot- 
house fruit  and  billiard  tables,  in  which 
there  is  no  real  insistence  on  any  but  the 
lowest  possible  standard  of  learning  and 
no  insistence  whatever  on  the  life  of  the 
intellect.     If  any  such  school  actually  exists 


Educational  Value  of  History.     167 

its    speedy    destruction    is    a    thing    worth 
working  for. 

But  when  all  this  has  been  said  we  still 
have  not  answered  the  question,  would  our 
course  of  history  be  dull  ?  It  must  be 
admitted  without  reservation  that  a  subject 
incapable  of  arousing  interest  in  any  but  a 
few  minds  is  absolutely  worthless  as  an 
instrument  of  general  education.  The  mind 
gains  little  or  nothing  from  mere  drudgery, 
and  what  little  may  be  gained  is  gained  at 
enormous  expense.  There  is  always  time 
wasted  in  doing  what  one  does  not  wish  to 
do.  Nor  will  the  mind  ever  really  under- 
stand a  subject  in  which  it  feels  no  interest. 
But  is  history,  of  the  quality  I  have  tried 
to  indicate,  such  a  subject  ?  There  are, 
perhaps,  minds  to  whom  human  life  is  un- 
interesting. They  are  certainly  not  average 
minds ;  nor  are  they  the  minds  of  children. 
History  of  any  kind  deals  essentially  with 
human  life.  It  is  not  as  though  we  were 
to  deal  in  mere  generalisations.  To  do  so 
would  be  to  fail  utterly  of  any  purpose.     It 


1 68     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

is  the  evolution  in  the  real  life  of  the  past 
of  the  real  life  of  the  present  that  history 
deals  with.  In  every  possible  way  the 
teacher  must  drive  home  the  actuality  of 
his  subject.  He  must  read  human  nature 
into  every  legal  technicality.  It  is  always 
there.  If  in  one  sense  our  sketch  of  European 
history  be  a  mere  sketch,  and  though  it  be 
drawn  by  science  and  not  by  art,  will  it  not, 
nevertheless,  work  out  to  a  fine  piece  of 
pageantry  ?  The  wreck  of  an  empire,  the 
fusion  of  races,  the  struggle  for  order,  the 
wars  of  classes,  the  conflict  among  the  nations 
for  wealth  and  expansion,  the  broadening  of 
the  stream  of  life,  the  advance  of  knowledge, 
the  conflict  of  idealisms,  the  movement 
towards  wider  and  wider  co-operation,  it 
makes,  surely,  no  mean  a  piece.  It  is  the 
very  essence  of  the  pageant  that  we  wish 
to  present.  Even  though  we  leave  to  others 
the  moral  commentary  and  present  the  thing 
from  no  sesthetic  standpoint,  it  must  surely 
appeal  to  the  dullest  imagination.  What 
has  sometimes  made  history  a   dull   subject 


Educational  Value  of  History,     1 69 

is  the  cramping  of  its  teaching  by  unintelli- 
gent restrictions  and  stupid  demands, — the 
restriction,  for  instance,  to  English  history 
and  the  demand  for  unrelated  and  insignifi- 
cant facts.  Properly  taught  it  could  hardly 
be  dull  except  to  the  very  dull,  It  will  help 
to  satisfy  every  kind  of  intellectual  curiosity 
concerning  the  things  of  the  social  order  in 
which  we  live.  It  will  not  only  give  new 
meaning  to  our  institutions  and  to  our  law, 
it  will  give  interest  and  significance  to  every 
one  of  our  old  villages  that  are  written  in 
Domesday,  and  to  almost  every  road  and 
field  in  England. 


170 


XI. 


OF  THE  EDUCATIONAL  VALUE   OF 
HISTORY— MORAL. 

What  can  be  done  with  history  as  an  instru- 
ment of  moral  training  ?  What  will  actually 
be  done  in  any  particular  case  depends  on 
the  teacher;  but  what  is  it  that  should  be 
done?  The  inculcation  of  useful  habits,  it 
has  been  pointed  out,  is  a  branch  of  techni- 
cal education.  Be  punctual — you  will  find  it 
pay:  tell  the  truth — it  generally  pays:  be 
considerate  of  the  claims  of  other  people — 
it  pays  in  the  long-run.  The  teaching  of 
history  as  such  has  nothing  to  do  with  this 
sort  of  thing.  Nor  can  history  have  much 
say  in  the  matter,  even  indirectly.  "  History," 
said  Henry  St  John,  "  is  philosophy  teaching 
by  examples  how  to  conduct  ourselves  in  all 


Value  of  History — Moral.      1 7 1 

the  situations  of  private  and  public  life." 
There  are,  truly,  examples  of  every  kind 
of  conduct,  attended  by  many  very 
different  kinds  of  results,  to  be  found  in 
history.  What  philosophy  has  to  say  to  it 
all  is  not  so  clear.  You  might,  no  doubt, 
instance  Frederick  the  Great  as  an  admir- 
able example  of  punctual  attention  to  busi- 
ness :  you  can  hardly  call  him  as  a  witness 
to  the  practical  utility  of  truthfulness. 

The  question  is  whether  history,  as  a 
scholastic  or  academic  "  subject,"  can  and 
should  be  made  an  instrument  of  a  moral 
training  not  merely  technical.  Such  train- 
ing or  teaching  must  have  reference  to 
something  beyond  the  mere  needs  of  the 
student.      It   must   refer   to   society  and  to 

the    future.      Not    only    so,    but   if it    has 

reference  only  to  immediate  social  needs  as 
interpreted  or  conceived  by  government,  it 
is  probable  that  no  honest  history -teaching 
will  be_consistent~witK  it.  5s  an  illustration 
of  what  is  meant,  an  order  issued  by  the 
German  Emperor  to  the  government  schools 


172     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

of  Germany  in  the  year  1889  may  be  quoted. 
After  laying  down  that  the  school  teaching 
of  history  should  "show  that  the  power  of 
the  State  alone  can  protect  the  individual's 
family,  freedom,  and  rights,"  it  continues  as 
follows:  "It  must  also  bring  the  youth 
to  recognise  how  Prussia's  kings  have 
exerted  themselves  to  better  the  conditions 
of  the  working  classes  in  a  continuous 
development,  from  the  legal  reforms  of 
Frederick  the  Great  and  from  the  abolition 
of  serfdom  to  the  present  day.  Moreover,  the 
school  must  show  by  means  of  statistics 
how  considerably  and  how  constantly  in  this 
century  the  wages  and  the  condition  of  the 
working  classes  have  improved  under  mon- 
archical protection." 

It  is  quite  needless  to  criticise  this  pro- 
nouncement specifically.  It  is  quoted  merely 
to  illustrate  the  danger  that  state  teachers 
may  be  required  to  uphold  the  interests  of 
some  governing  class,  to  maintain  some 
particular  form  of  government  or  some  par- 
ticular system  of  political  thought.     This  is 


Value  of  History — Moral.      173 

a  danger  inherent  in  all  systems  of  state 
education.  It  may  exist  equally  under  a 
democratic  as  under  an  autocratic  govern- 
ment. Quite  clearly  it  does  not  matter 
whether  an  order  of  the  kind  quoted  he 
issued  by  an  Emperor  or  by  a  County 
Council.  In  either  case  it  is  equally  an 
offence  to  intellectual  honesty  and  to  the 
cause  of  truth. 

It  is  hardly  necessary  to  deal  with  vague 
current  talk  of  the  elevating  influence  of 
hero  -  worship  or  of  enthusiasm  about  this 
cause  or  that.  There  are  weightier  pronounce- 
ments. Lord  Acton  laid  it  down  that  the 
main  end  of  the  study  of  history  is  the 
development  of  the  moral  judgment  and 
the  deepening  of  the  sense  of  moral  law. 
Bishop  Stubbs  says  that  one,  at  least,  of 
the  most  important  results  to  be  obtained 
through  the  study  of  history  is  the  attain- 
ment of  a  "perception  of  the  workings  of 
the  Almighty  Ruler  of  the  world,"  a  recog- 
nition of  "  a  hand  of  justice  and  mercy,  a 
hand  of  progress  and  order,  a  kind  and  wise 


1 74    Place  of  History  in  Education. 

disposition,  ever  leading  the  world  on  to 
the  better  but  never  forcing,  and  out  of  the 
evil  of  man's  working,  bringing  continually 
that  which  is  good." 

It  is  not  necessary  here  to  analyse  these 
views  or  to  go  into  the  difference  be- 
tween them.  They  are  extremely  interesting 
views,  and  they  may  be  correct ;  but  we  do 
not  know  that  they  are.  They  appear 
to  involve  propositions  we  are  not  in  a 
position  to  prove,  and  certainly  must  not 
assume.  We  might,  indeed,  adopt  Lord 
Acton's  view  in  the  pious  hope  that  our 
course  of  historical  study  would,  indeed, 
deepen  the  sense  of  moral  law  in  the  minds 
of  our  students.  But  if  we  adopted  that  of 
Bishop  Stubbs,  or  if  we  deliberately  tried 
through  the  teaching  of  history  to  deepen 
the  sense  of  any  particular  moral  law,  we 
should  be  putting  a  strain  on  our  present 
knowledge  greater  than  it  will  bear.  We 
should  lose  our  intellectual  honesty,  and 
with  that  all  hope  of  arriving  at  truth. 

We  are  confronted  again  with  this  trouble- 


Value  of  History — Moral.      175 

some  question  of  what  sort  of  moral  training 
is  wanted.  The  deplorable  fact  is  that  we 
really  do  not  know.  Personally,  you  may 
be  inclined  to  think  that  you  do  know ; 
but  when  you  analyse  your  opinion  it  will 
probably  resolve  itself  partly  into  personal 
likes  and  dislikes  of  which  you  can  give  no 
account,  and  partly  into  ethical  theories 
which  are  disputable.  The  actual  "  morals," 
as  distinct  from  the  ethics,  of  a  people  at 
any  one  time  may  be  regarded  as  made  up 
partly  of  qualities,  partly  of  habits,  partly 
of  theories  of  duty,  partly  of  fear  of  other 
people  or  their  opinions,  and  partly  of 
notions  as  to  what  is  worth  having  in  life. 
Moreover,  both  the  theoretic  and  the  actual 
"  morality "  of  a  people  are  involved  with 
all  manner  of  arrangements  that  can  only 
be  regarded  as  temporary, — laws  of  property, 
for  instance,  and  laws  of  marriage.  How  is 
it  proposed  to  affect  all  this  through  the 
teaching  of  history  ?  What  sort  of  a  moral- 
ity is  it  that  you  want  taught?  Is  it  an 
ethical   theory  ?     Is   it    a    standard    of   con- 


176    Place  of  History  in  Education. 

duct?  What  history  will  show  is  that 
ethical  theories  and  standards  of  conduct 
alike  change  and  pass  away. 

Desire  is  king,  and  is  self-centred.  It  is 
a  question,  finally,  of  the  quality  of  desire 
and  the  direction  of  the  will.  If  we  can 
do  something  to  make  the  will  intelligent, 
we  shall  probably  do  for  morality  in  the 
larger  sense  all  that  we  can  hope  or  reason- 
ably wish  to  do.  If  a  man's  desires  are 
mean,  so  will  his  conduct  be.  But  mean 
desires  are  to  some  extent  dependent  upon 
a  lack  of  the  sense  of  proportion,  and  upon 
an  unintelligent  estimate  of  values.  In  this 
direction  jjie  study  of  history  should  do 
something  for  us.  It  should,  at  least,  help 
us  to  get  rid  of  any  overweening  estimate 
of  our  own  importance.  It  should  help  to 
make  the  simply  selfish  life  seem  both 
petty  and  ridiculous.  By  pointing  always 
to  large  issues  and  large  results,  by  insist- 
ing on  human  life  as  a  complex  whole,  it 
should  counteract  the  tendency  to  bury  our 
lives    in    the    merely    personal.      It    should 


Value  of  History — Moral.      177 

crucify  pitilessly  against  an  enormous  back- 
ground the  meanness  of  all  mean  things. 
It  should  widen  our  sympathies  along  with 
_our  understanding. 

There  is  one  other  thing  that  may  be 
done  or  aimed  at.  Analysis  ought  to  show 
us,  in  time,  what  are  the  moral  qualities 
that  make  for  national  success.  At  every 
turn  we  are  forced  to  consider  this  question 
in  one  case  or  another.  We  are  forced  to 
consider  the  moral  element  in  a  victory  in 
war  or  in  a  struggle  between  two  states, 
lasting,  perhaps,  for  centuries,  or  in  the 
decline  of  an  empire.  So  far  as  we  can 
arrive  at  positive  conclusions  of  general  ap- 
plication as  to  the  qualities  that  make  for 
success  among  peoples  and  at  the  historical 
meaning  of  moral  degeneration,  we  shall 
arrive  at  conclusions  of  some  ethical  value. 
There  can  be  no  doubt  that  we  ought  to 
insist  on  such  conclusions  when  we  have 
arrived  at  them  :  only  it  behoves  us  to  be 
extremely  cautious  how  we  conclude.  There 
are  pitfalls  on  every  side  along  this  narrow 

M 


1 78    Place  of  History  in  Education. 

path.  We  must  be  on  guard  against  all 
current  and  conventional  assumptions,  and 
equally  against  our  personal  likes  and  dis- 
likes. We  must-~deal  very  faithfully.  We 
must  be  quite  prepared  to  accept  con- 
clusions that  shock  our  moral  sense, — the 
conclusion,  for  instance,  that  victory  in  a 
given  case  was  largely  due  to  the  ferocious 
egotism  of  the  victors  and  the  brutality  of 
their  disregard  of  other  people's  claims.  If 
we  set  up  a  moral  law  and  then  look  for  its 
working  in  history,  we  shall  reach  conclu- 
sions of  no  value  whatever.  Connected  with 
this  search  for  the  moral  factors  in  national 
success  is  a  certain  danger.  National  success 
may  be  measured  by  survival  limit,  by  secur- 
ity, by  wealth,  by  the  realisation  of  national 
ideals,  by  achievement  in  art  or  in  science. 
If  any  of  these  be  used  as  a  measure  of 
individual  success,  what  becomes  of  moral- 
ity? We  cannot  teach  that  being  good  in 
any  accepted  sense  always  pays,  or  that 
what  pays  is  good.  The  clanger  is,  of 
course,    greatest    in    dealing    with    children. 


Value  of  History — Moral.      1 79 

We  can  hardly  do  worse  for  our  children, 
morally,  than  to  teach  them  to  measure 
goodness  by  success  in  any  ordinary  sense, 
or  in  any  sense  that  the  word  can  bear  in 
history.  If  we  dare  to  do  so  we  shall,  no 
doubt,  be  giving,  in  the  strict  sense,  moral 
instruction. 

In    the    restricted    sense    such    instruction 
will  be  immoral. 


i8o 


XII. 

CONCERNING  DIFFERENCE   OF   SEX. 

So  far  we  have  assumed  throughout  that, 
technical  teaching  apart,  the  education  of 
women  should  proceed  on  the  same  lines  as 
that  of  men.  What  right  have  we  to  make 
this  assumption  ?  It  is  argued  that  the 
mind  of  woman  differs  profoundly  from 
that  of  man ;  that  her  natural  interests  are 
different  from  those  of  a  man,  and  that  it 
will  prove  impossible  to  arouse  in  her  efficient 
interest  in  the  courses  of  study  which  effici- 
ently interest  men.  It  is  argued  further  that 
as  woman's  social  functions  differ  radically 
from  man's,  so  not  merely  her  technical 
education  but  her  education  in  the  fuller 
sense  should  be  conducted  differently. 
Society,    not    only   now   but    in   the   future, 


Concerning  Difference  of  Sex.     181 

demands  from  women  work  different  from 
that  it  demands  from  men,  and  hence  must 
demand  a  different  training  for  its  women. 
In  respect  of  the  teaching  of  history,  a  dis- 
tinction is  already  made  in  the  government 
schools  of  Germany.  In  the  German  high 
schools  or  secondary  schools  for  girls,  what 
we  roughly  call  political  history  is  either 
not  taught  at  all  or  is  taught  very  sketchily. 
Girls,  it  appears,  are  not  expected  to  acquire 
any  knowledge  of  international  relations  or 
even  of  constitutional  history.  Political 
history,  it  appears,  is  only  to  be  "touched 
upon  in  broad  lines,  as  ...  it  conduces  to  the 
awakening  of  a  warm  and  personal  interest 
in  great  and  active  peoples  and  nations, 
their  fate  and  their  works."  What  precisely 
this  means  is  not  very  clear ;  but  it  seems 
that  girls  are  supposed  to  be  concerned  with 
the  history  of  literature  and  of  art,  with 
religious  and  moral  ideas,  and  with  "national 
and  domestic  customs,"  whatever  that  may 
exactly  include.  The  distinctions  involved 
seem   superficial   and    indeed    arbitrary.      It 


1 82     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

is  needless  to  criticise  them  in  detail,  but 
they  do  not  seem  to  be  distinctly  related 
to  any  real  difference  between  the  minds  of 
men  and  of  women.  I  may  be  allowed  to 
say  that,  in  my  experience,  so  far  as  women 
show  special  aptitude  for  any  special  de- 
partment of  history  it  is  for  the  economic 
and  constitutional  aspects  of  the  subject. 
Eoughly,  the  German  idea  seems  to  be  that 
women  are  concerned  to  know  something 
about  the  social  life  of  peoples,  but  are  not 
concerned  to  know  anything  about  their 
political  life.  This  appears  to  involve  the 
assertion  that  they  are  not  to  study  evolu- 
tion at  all,  and  do  not  need  any  precise 
notion  of  development  even  in  social  life. 
For  otherwise  it  is  quite  impossible  to 
maintain  the  distinction.  In  any  case, 
however,  the  important  thing  is  that  the 
distinction  is  made  at  all. 

The  question  is  a  quite  serious  one,  and 
if  we  in  England  have  not  yet  taken  it 
quite  seriously,  that  does  not  mean  that  we 
may  not  be  doing  so  before  long.    Possibly 


Concerning  Difference  of  Sex.     1 83 

it  only  means  that  we  have  not  really  as 
yet  paid  much  serious  attention  to  the 
question  of  a  national  educational  system. 

It  is  impossible  here  to  argue  the  question 
at  length,  but  it  may  be  worth  while  to 
adduce  a  few  considerations  in  connection 
with  it.  In  the  first  place  it  may  be  pointed 
out  that  much  of  the  objection  to  the  edu- 
cation of  men  and  women  on  the  same  lines 
seems  to  arise  from  a  confusion  between 
"technical  education"  and  the  truly  educa- 
tive process.  In  regard  to  the  former  there 
is  obviously  a  strong  case  or  rather  an 
imperative  need  for  some  differential  treat- 
ment of  girls  and  boys.  But  when  the 
distinction  between  the  two  kinds  of  edu- 
cation is  clearly  realised  it  will  probably 
be  seen  that,  unless  all  education  is  to 
be  essentially  "  technical,"  the  assertion 
that  women  should  be  educated,  in  the 
larger  sense,  on  different  lines  from  men 
is  an  assertion  that  cannot  rationally  be 
maintained. 

Only    one   does   not   feel   quite   sure   that 


1 84    Place  of  History  in  Education. 

things  are  really  moving  in  this  direction. 
We  do  not  seem  to  have  made  up  our 
minds  as  to  what  we  want  women  to  be 
and  to  do  in  our  coming  civilisation.  If 
men  were  to  make  up  their  minds  on  this 
point  in  one  way  and  women  in  another, 
there  would,  of  course,  be  a  struggle.  Such 
a  struggle,  however  limited,  would  be  dis- 
astrous, if  only  because  the  victors  would 
not  gain  what  they  wanted  but  something 
different.  What  does  the  assertion  of  . 
difference  between  man's  mind  and  woman's 
mean  ?  It  is  quite  incredible  that  the 
difference  is  radical.  After  all,  a  man  has 
a  mother  and  a  woman  a  father.  Such 
differences  as  exist  on  an  average  look  like 
differences  of  detail  and  of  degree.  As  to 
the  total  difference  between  the  sexes  it  is 
surely  quite  great  enough  in  the  nature  of 
things.  There  is  no  need  to  emphasise  and 
develop  it  artificially,  even  if  we  do  not 
rather  desire  to  minimise  it.  Again,  what 
is  the  meaning  of  the  argument  based  on 
difference  of  social  function  ?     No  one  denies 


Concerning  Difference  of  Sex.     185 

the  difference,  but  how  does  it  bear  on  the 
educative  process  ?  If  the  right  end  of  that 
process  is  provision  of  a  basis  for  sound 
thinking,  are  we  going  to  say  that  we  do 
not  want  women  to  think  at  all  ?  We  want 
them,  in  that  case,  just  to  fit  themselves 
into  the  system  provided  by  men's  thinking. 
Then  the  conclusion  is  clear.  The  education 
of  women  must  be  "technical"  only,  and 
the  more  empirical  in  character  the  better. 
But  who  in  the  world  wants  this  ?  Can  it 
be  conceived  that  this  is  what  the  coming 
civilisation  will  want?  All  this  talk  about 
difference  of  function  necessitating  a  radical 
difference  of  education  seems  to  rest  finally 
on  a  conception  of  men  and  women  as  things 
hopelessly  divided ;  whereas,  in  truth,  we 
are  all  parts  of  each  other.  We  may  return, 
provisionally,  to  our  original  assumption. 
The  education  that  is  good  enough  for 
women  will  be  just  good  enough  for  men. 

If  men  had  any  really  radical  objection 
to  the  intellectual  education  of  women,  that 
would  be  practically  a  very  serious  matter. 


1 86     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

But  those  who  think  they  have  are  probably 
under  an  illusion.  It  was  reported  not  long 
ago  in  the  newspapers  that  at  an  Oxford 
Union  debate  some  one  declared  that  if 
women  were  given  the  parliamentary  fran- 
chise women  would  be  utterly  destroyed. 
Presumably  the  speaker  attached  some  pe- 
culiar meaning  to  the  word  woman,  which 
seems  an  odd  thing  to  do.  But  one  has  heard 
a  good  deal  of  the  prospect  of  this  or  that 
destroying  the  attractiveness  of  women  from 
men's  point  of  view.  But  on  this  point  we 
may  put  our  trust  in  nature, — that  attrac- 
tiveness has  its  roots  far  deeper  than  any 
of  our  modes  of  thought  or  any  of  our 
social  arrangements. 


i87 


XIII. 

THE   INTRODUCTION  TO  HISTORICAL 
STUDY. 

The  course  of  historical  study  which  we  have 
very  roughly  sketched  is  to  include  the 
history  of  Europe,  is  to  have  very  special 
reference  to  England,  but  is  not  to  ignore 
ancient  Athens  or  even  the  Stone  Age.  It 
is  to  be  scientific  in  character.  It  should, 
ideally,  begin  in  the  primary  schools  and 
end  in  the  university.  We  have  now  to 
consider  the  question  how  such  a  course 
should  be  started.  Is  history  to  form  part 
of  the  curriculum  in  primary  schools,  and  if 
so  in  what  form  ?  If  not,  is  there  to  be  any 
sort  of  preliminary  teaching  leading  up  to 
the  teaching  of  history  proper? 

In   most   of  its   aspects   the   course    as    a 


1 88     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

whole  will  be  non-moral.  Its  ethical  value 
will,  perhaps,  mainly  consist  in  helping  to 
establish  proportions  and  values.  The 
student  will  learn  to  look  at  things  in  the 
mass  and  to  refer  action  to  its  remoter 
consequences.  He  will  be  gently  assisted 
to  realise  his  own  insignificance  socially, 
and  at  the  same  time  to  realise  how  com- 
pletely all  his  action  merges  in  a  result.  He 
will  see  progress  in  the  making.  He  will 
perhaps  indirectly  be  brought  to  form  new 
ideas  as  to  what  matters  and  what  does  not 
matter,  as  what  is  worth  having  and  what 
is  not.  But  all  this  clearly  belongs  to  a 
relatively  late  stage  of  the  course.  We  can- 
not begin  by  using  history  as  a  vehicle  for 
the  moral  instruction  of  the  child. 

Beginnings  are  generally  difficult.  It 
seems  clear  that  if  we  start  teaching  any 
sort  of  formal  history  to  a  child  under  four- 
teen, we  shall  be  teaching  what  will  be  to 
the  child  unintelligible  rubbish.  We  shall 
be  assuming  the  existence  in  the  child's  mind 
of  what  either  is  not  there  at  all  or  exists 


Introduction  to  Historical  Study.    189 

too  vaguely  to  be  brought  iuto  connection 
with  our  narrative.  If  we  try  to  tell  the 
history  of  England  to  a  child  as  a  story,  it 
will  be  a  dull  story  and  almost  meaningless. 
It  will  be  a  story  about  nothing  in  particular. 
Moreover,  we  shall  find  it  very  difficult  to 
make  any  statement  relevant  to  our  main 
purpose  and  at  once  true  and  intelligible. 
Suppose  we  are  talking  about  what  used  to 
be  called  the  Heptarchy.  We  cannot  tell 
the  child  that  a  number  of  little  kingdoms 
existed  in  England  without  explaining  what 
we  mean  by  a  "kingdom."  What  notion 
will  the  child  form  of  the  king?  Will  he 
think  of  the  king  as  a  man  sitting  on  a 
throne  with  a  crown  on  his  head,  occasion- 
ally giving  orders  about  nothing  in  particular 
and  surrounded  by  persons  in  reverential 
attitudes?  Clearly  this  will  not  do.  But 
how  are  we  to  explain  the  king  ?  We  shall, 
perhaps,  find  ourselves  telling  stories  about 
particular  kings,  who  will  just  be  grown-up 
people,  their  kingship  being  a  mysterious 
and     ornamental     something,    linking    them 


190     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

vaguely  with  King  Edward  VII.  But  the 
important  thing  about  a  king  is,  as  a  rule, 
not  his  personality  but — if  one  may  use  the 
word  in  an  unusual  sense — his  kingliness. 
The  important  thing  about  him  is  the  things 
he  is  legally  entitled  to  do,  the  things  he  is 
expected  to  do,  the  things  he  takes  to  be  his 
rights  or  duties,  the  ideas  other  people  have 
about  his  claims,  his  property,  and  the  nature 
of  the  hold  he  has  on  his  subjects.  All  this 
makes  up  his  "  kingliness,"  and  if  we  do  not 
explain  this,  the  word  "  king  "  is  nonsensical. 
And  how  are  we  to  explain  this  to  any  young 
child  ? 

Are  we  going  to  start  by  telling  the 
child  stories  ?  It  is,  no  doubt,  possible  to 
interest  children  by  telling  them  more  or 
less  true  stories  about  personages  absurdly 
called  "historical";  and  in  doing  so  you 
may  succeed  in  conveying  to  the  child 
mind  the  notion  of  real  people  who  lived 
a  long  time  ago.  But  except  so  far  as  by 
telling  such  stories  you  can  help  the  child  to 
a  sense  of  time  and  of  change,  it  is  not  clear 


Introduction  to  Historical  Study.    191 

what  you  hope  to  effect  in  the  way  of 
preparation  for  an  understanding  of  history. 
You  are  in  some  danger,  too,  of  planting  in 
the  child's  mind  the  notion  that  history  is 
essentially  concerned  with  individual  struggles 
and  exploits.  You  will  not  even  have  the 
satisfaction  of  telling  good  stories.  Histori- 
cal stories  are  not,  as  a  rule,  good  stories  for 
children.  They  imply  too  much  and  convey 
too  little.  They  are  either  too  thin  or  they 
are  incomprehensible.  Fairy  stories  are 
much  better  and  probably  less  misleading. 
If  it  were  only  a  question  of  how  to  stim- 
ulate the  child's  imagination  you  might, 
indeed,  do  as  certain  teachers  are  actually 
now  doing  and  tell  stories  now  about  histori- 
cal heroes,  and  now  from  Spenser's  Faerie 
Queene.  But  it  is  a  question  of  how  to 
arouse  the  imagination  in  a  particular  direc- 
tion, and  of  how  to  prepare  the  child's  mind 
to  deal  with  those  aspects  of  human  life 
with  which  history  deals.  Your  stories  of 
historical  heroes  will  only  have  a  remote 
bearing  upon  historical  questions,   and  your 


192     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

stories  from  the  Faerie  Queene  will  have  none 
at  all. 

It  is,  nevertheless,  possible  that  very 
young  children  should  make  acquaintance 
with  history  through  such  stories  and  only 
through  such  stories ;  and  it  is  possible  that, 
in  some  slight  degree  and  very  indirectly, 
these  may  help  to  prepare  their  minds  for 
the  history  that  is  to  come  later.  But  it 
seems  clear  that  they  ought  not  to  be 
allowed  to  associate  such  stories  with  any- 
thing called  "history."  They  should  asso- 
ciate them  rather  with  the  Faerie  Queene. 
Whatever  value  such  "  historical "  stories 
may  have  for  them  it  cannot  consist  mainly 
in  their  being  in  any  sense  preparatory  to 
a  history  course.  If  it  be  of  little  use  to 
tell  the  child  more  or  less  true  stories  and 
of  no  use  at  all  to  start  with  any  sort  of 
narrative  account  of  English  history,  are 
we  to  wait  till  the  child  is  fourteen  or  so 
and  then  take  the  plunge  into  a  regular 
history  course  ?  Something  like  this  is 
what,  in  very  many  cases,   we  actually  do. 


Introduction  to  Historical  Study.    193 

Children  are  put  into  technical  history  with- 
out any  sort  of  formal  preparation,  and  they 
"  learn "  it  for  some  years  without  even 
finding  out  what  it  is  all  about. 

No  one  who  has  acted  as  a  history 
examiner  in  the  matriculation  examinations 
of  London  University  can  have  much  doubt 
of  our  need  of  some  course  of  teaching 
introductory  to  and  preparatory  for  our 
history  course.  We  ought  to  make  a  start 
by  giving  the  child  some  notion  of  the 
subject-matter  of  history.  In  the  largest 
sense  this  is  simply  the  whole  past  life 
of  humanity  considered  as  an  evolution. 
Therefore,  in  the  logical  order,  we  need 
first  of  all  to  develop  the  sense  of  past 
time,  and  then  of  great  changes  in  that 
past.  But  we  should  be  doing  this  along 
with  something  else.  If  nothing  less  than 
the  past  life  of  humanity  forms  the  subject- 
matter  of  history,  yet  what  history  has 
most  specifically  to  deal  with  is  the  life 
of  societies  as  such,  the  life  of  states,  the 
life  of  institutions  and    of  law,   the   life    of 

N 


194    Place  of  History  in  Education. 

classes,  the  life  of  trade  and  of  knowledge. 
To  all  this  the  child  needs  an  introduction. 
We  have  to  present  to  the  child  an  aspect 
of  human  life,  and  we  cannot  do  so  all  at 
once.  What  we  first  of  all  have  to  do  is 
to  make  real  for  the  child  the  elements  of 
the  historical  course,  the  elements,  that  is, 
of  social  and  political  life. 

It  sounds  as  though  it  might  be  very 
difficult  to  do  this,  and  perhaps  it  is.  The 
question  is  not  whether  it  be  difficult,  but 
whether  it  be  possible.  It  is  worth  while 
•to  point  out  that  in  the  national  schools  of 
Belgium  they  are  actually  trying  the  ex- 
periment of  beginning  just  in  this  way. 
You  take  a  class  of  little  boys  or  girls. 
"  What  is  your  father  ? "  the  teacher  will 
ask  one  of  them,  and  with  some  trouble 
the  fact  is  elicited  that  the  father  is  a 
blacksmith.  Then  follow  questions  as  to 
what  that  means,  and  important  facts  are 
sot  at.  The  child's  father  shoes  horses 
and  so  on  for  other  people,  and  takes 
money  for  what  he  gives,   and  with  money 


Introduction  to  Historical  Study.    195 

buys  food  and  other  things  necessary  to 
keep  the  family  going.  In  a  very  short 
time  we  have  got  to  the  economic  basis  of 
our  social  structure  without  using  any  of 
these  formidable  words;  and  we  are  getting 
at  that  ancient  unit  of  social  structure,  the 
family.  There  follow  questions  as  to  the 
mother's  position  in  the  family  business. 

There   will   probably   have   to   be    a   good 
deal  of  experiment  before  we  can  determine 
the   precisely   right   method    of   working   on 
these    lines.      But    in    the    opinion    of    the 
present    writer    the     Belgians    are    on    the 
right    track,    and   the   sooner   we   begin   ex- 
perimenting   the    better.     Take    an    English 
village   child   of  any  class   you   please  as  a 
simple  case.     The  first  thing  that  ought  to 
be  doue   by  way   of  preparation    for   a   real 
teaching    of   history    is    to    give    that    child 
an  idea  of  the   village   as   a   community   or 
society  in  little.     It  is  a  business  of  estab- 
lishing essential  facts  and  connections.    We 
need  not  look  too  closely.    There  are  many 
things    we    cannot    explain,    and    if   we    do 


196    Place  of  History  in  Education. 

our  teaching  well  there  will  be  many  ques- 
tions asked  that  we  cannot  answer  intel- 
ligibly. As  soon,  for  instance,  as  we  reach 
the  family  we  get  things  impossible  to  ex- 
plain ;  and  yet  a  notion  even  of  marriage, 
as  a  partnership  the  conditions  of  which 
are  to  some  extent  settled  by  law,  can  be 
given.  Through  the  everyday  life,  some- 
thing of  which  the  child  sees,  we  get  to 
money  and  work  and  wages  and  rent.  We 
define  the  notion  of  property.  We  must 
be  careful  at  first  to  avoid  intricacy,  and 
we  may  even  be  obliged  to  suggest  what 
is  not  true,  though,  of  course,  doing  so  as 
little  as  possible.  All  the  first  steps  will 
be  slow ;  but  the  fundamental  facts  are  not 
really  difficult  of  apprehension.  We  shall 
come  in  time  to  the  government  of  the 
village.  In  a  certain  English  village  a  class 
of  little  girls  was  once  asked  the  question, 
"Who  governs  the  country?"  The  answer 
unanimously  given  was,  "  The  king."  "  But," 
insisted  the  teacher,  "  who  governs  under 
the  king  ? "     This  question  puzzled  some  of 


Introduction  to  Historical  Study.    1 97 

the  children,  but  from  others  the  answer 
came  pat :  "  The  policeman."  It  was  quite 
a  good  answer,  and  we  too  when  we  come 
to  government  should  begin  with  the  village 
policeman. 

All  the  buildings,  roads,  institutions,  and 
personages  of  the  village  are  object-lessons. 
We  shall  come  to  the  church  and  the 
parson,  the  post-office  and  the  village  coun- 
cil. Even  the  squire  will  be  useful  in  ex- 
plaining the  nature  of  property  and  rent. 
Very  soon  we  shall,  by  means  of  the  roads, 
be  establishing  connection  with  the  nearest 
market-town.  There,  if  not  earlier,  we  shall 
meet  the  railway.  All  our  roads,  mental 
and  physical,  will  finally  lead  us  to  London, 
and  London  we  shall  exhibit  as  the  distant 
centre  where  post-office,  roads,  railways,  and 
policemen  all  meet.  We  shall  reach  the 
idea  of  a  large  community  that  includes 
the  village,  and  the  idea  of  a  central  direct- 
ing power.  From  the  policeman  we  can 
reach  the  king  by  way  of  justices  of  the 
peace   and   the   assize   town.     It   might,   in- 


198    Place  of  History  in  Education. 

deed,  be  very  difficult  to  teach  on  these 
lines  but  that  we  should  have  under  our 
eyes  all  the  things  which  we  begin  to 
teach  about. 

Along  with  all  this  we  should  try  to  work 
in  the  idea  of  the  past  and  of  change.  We 
should  not,  in  the  early  stages,  make  any 
attempt  to  go  far  back.  We,  in  the  year 
1909,  are  in  some  respects  very  favourably 
situated  for  bringing  home  the  idea  of 
change  to  the  minds  of  our  children.  Only 
some  eighty  years  ago,  in  the  lifetime  of 
the  child's  grandfather,  there  were  no  rail- 
ways. That  simple  fact  alone  should  help 
us  a  good  deal.  We  ought  to  be  able 
easily  to  lead  the  child's  mind  from  that 
to  other  connected  changes  in  those  eighty 
years.  So,  gradually,  we  can  feel  our  way 
towards  a  remoter  past  and  vaster  differ- 
ences. In  doing  this,  also,  we  shall  find 
things  in  or  near  the  village  to  help  us. 
Even  if  our  village  church  be  a  new  one 
there  will  be  old  churches,  old  houses,  within 
walking  distance. 


Iutrodtictiou  to  Historical  Study.    199 

Once  we  have  implanted  the  idea  of  a 
very  long  past  and  of  change  upon  change, 
century  after  century,  we  can  begin  telling 
stories  that  will  mean  something.  If,  at  the 
same  time,  the  child  is  being  grounded  in 
Iaii2;ua2;e  and  in  the  bare  elements  of 
physics,  and  from  his  science  teacher  has 
been  getting  at  the  notion  of  a  very  remote 
past  in  which  even  the  animals  and  plants 
were  different,  and  has  been  learning  some- 
thing of  really  elementary  geography,  we 
shall  have  laid,  finally,  a  good  foundation 
for  strictly  historical  and,  indeed,  for  all 
other  kinds  of  teaching.  At  about  the  age 
of  fourteen,  if  not  earlier,  we  ought  to  be 
able  to  begin  teaching  our  children  history 
proper  —  that  is,  the  history  of  all  those 
social  arrangements  about  which  they  have 
been  learning  all  this  time. 

In  the  case  of  the  children  of  our  great 
cities  this  sociological  preparatory  course  is 
not,  perhaps,  quite  so  simple  a  matter. 
These  great  cities  are  so  complex  and  pre- 
suppose so  much.     Yet  the  difficulty  is  only 


200     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

one  of  degree.  And  in  London,  at  all 
events,  the  teacher  will  have  advantages 
denied  to  every  teacher  elsewhere.  For 
here  he  has,  under  the  eyes  of  his  children, 
the  outward  and  visible  signs  of  all  the 
central  things — Houses  of  Parliament,  Gov- 
ernment offices,  the  Bank  of  England,  as  well 
as  magnificent  monuments  of  the  past  from 
Westminster  Abbey  downwards. 

It  may  further  be  remarked  that,  even  if 
we  occupied  all  the  time  up  to  the  age  of 
fourteen  with  this  sort  of  instruction,  and 
then  stopped  and  so  never  got  to  formal 
history -teaching  at  all,  this  would  be  in- 
finitely better  than  the  attempt  to  teach 
history  without  any  sort  of  introduction. 
For  we  should  have  given  the  child  some- 
thing worth  having  in  itself,  and  infinitely 
more  educative  than  a  knowledge  of  the 
names  of  a  number  of  kings  and  other 
distinguished  persons,  with  their  "dates," 
and  some  excessively  vague  notion  of  their 
doings. 

When  we  do   begin   to    teach   history    we 


Introduction  to  Historical  Study.    201 

shall  be  able  to  start  on  right  lines,  already 
implied  in  our  preparatory  course.  The 
child  will  really  know  what  it  is  all  about. 
He  will  realise  that  he  is  being  taught  about 
the  way  real  people  lived  and  managed  their 
common  affairs  in  his  own  country  a  long 
time  ago.  He  will  see  it  first  of  all 
as  the  story  of  his  own  community  in 
the  past.  The  idea  of  causation  should  be 
introduced  as  early  as  possible,  but  there 
must  be  no  premature  insistence  on  it. 
The  first  sketch  given  of  English  history 
should  be  a  sketch  of  the  main  course  of 
change  with  regard  to  sequence  in  time 
but  with  little  insistence  on  causation.  It 
is  essentially,  of  course,  all  a  matter  of 
causal  connections,  but  we  must  first  give 
a  roughly  accurate  outline  of  what  has  to 
be  explained.  It  is  possible  that  the  ideally 
best  first  course  in  English  history  for  a 
village  child  would  concern  itself  mainly  with 
the  history  of  the  village,  and  for  a  town 
child  with  that  of  the  town.  In  any  case, 
and  without  doubt,   it  should  at  every  step 


202     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

try  to  make  the  child  realise  what  the 
central  government  and  its  revolutions  meant 
to  the  village.  We  certainly  should  not 
begin  by  concentrating  attention  on  those 
far  -  away  beings,  the  central  authorities. 
We  want  the  child  to  know,  as  far  as 
possible,  what  the  West  Saxon  king  meant 
to  the  West  Saxon  village.  We  do  not  in 
the  least  want  him  to  know  whether  a 
particular  king  obtained  his  position  by 
murdering  his  brother  or  otherwise.  We 
want  him  to  have  some  clear  notion  of  the 
distribution  of  property  in  the  settlements 
of  the  Saxons  and  of  their  modes  of  justice. 
We  do  not  need  to  make  much  use  of 
legends  about  Hengest  and  Horsa.  We 
want  the  child  to  have  an  idea  of  what 
the  establishment  of  the  Christian  Church 
involved,  and  to  learn  something  of  the  bishop 
and  his  monasterium,  and  of  how  things 
altered  and  of  how  the  village  church  came 
at  last  to  be  built.  But  just  as  it  is  the 
kingliness  of  the  king  that  we  want  and 
not  the  king  himself,   so  also  we  want  not 


Introduction  to  Historical  Study.    203 

the  bishop  but  his  episcopacy.  We  do  not 
need  chatter  about  Augustine  or  Paulinus. 
We  do  not  need  to  refer  to  these  people  at 
all  except  as  aids  to  the  imagination.  We 
must  fix  the  minds  of  the  children  not  on 
a  few  people  here  and  there  but  on  the 
common  life  and  the  great  changes  of  it.  At 
every  step  we  should  make  all  possible  use 
not  only  of  illustrative  tales,  which  may 
be  very  useful,  but  of  such  monuments  of 
the  past  as  lie  scattered  over  our  yet  un- 
spoiled country.  We  can  only  at  this  stage 
get  a  bare  outline ;  but  we  want  a  good 
large  comprehensive  outline  first  of  all. 
Later  we  shall  have  to  go  over  it  all  again 
with  more  detail  and  more  explanations. 
That  filling  in  should  commence  after  we 
have  begun  to  deal  with  European  history 
as  a  whole. 


204 


XIV. 

A  FINAL  DIFFICULY:    THE  POINT 
OF  VIEW. 

History  has  this  special  disadvantage  as  a 
subject  for  teaching,  that  the  personal  phil- 
osophy of  the  teacher  and  his  social,  political, 
or  religious  opinions  bear  upon  the  subject 
taught.  The  teacher,  say,  of  geometry,  faces 
no  such  difficulty.  Whatever  his  religious 
opinions  may  be  they  have  no  relation  to 
the  properties  of  a  circle.  But  our  ideas 
of  good  and  evil,  our  ideas  of  what  is 
supremely  important  for  individuals  or  for 
societies,  determine  our  ideas  of  progress 
and  so  to  a  considerable  extent  the  view 
we  take  of  the  past  life  of  man.  We  cannot 
get  away  from  ourselves,  and  if  we  have  a 
philosophy  or  a  religion  we  must  needs  see 


A  Final  Difficulty.  205 

the  human  past  in  the  light  of  it.  It 
may  fairly  be  argued  that  by  making  an 
effort  to  divest  ourselves  of  our  real  beliefs 
in  dealing  with  history  we  shall  merely  be 
making  an  absurd  pretence,  and  shall  end 
either  by  telling  our  pupils  what  we  believe 
to  be  untrue  or  by  telling  them  nothing  at 
all.  It  is  mere  nonsense  to  say  that  we 
should  simply  describe  things  as  they  were, 
for  this  is  the  very  question  :  how  were  they  ? 
Clearly  we  cannot  answer  this  question  by 
any  array  of  figures  and  names. 

This  subjective  difficulty  is  evidently  a 
serious  one  for  every  historical  teacher  and 
writer.  To  say  this  is  not  to  say  that  it 
constitutes  an  equally  serious  obstacle  to  the 
progress  of  historical  science.  It  is  conceiv- 
able that  the  long  continued  study  of  history 
will  gradually  eliminate  all  errors  arising  from 
the  interference  of  personal  opinion  :  though, 
indeed,  this  sounds  rather  like  saying  that  the 
errors  of  oue  writer  will  be  corrected  by  the 
errors  of  others.  But  for  the  moment  we 
may   leave   the   larger   question   aside.      For 


206     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

the  individual  teacher,  in  the  present  state 
of  knowledge,  there  is  a  serious  difficulty,  and 
the  nature  of  it  must  be  made  clear. 

History  deals  not  with  static  things,  like 
ideal  circles,  but  with  action  and  movement. 
We  cannot  be  content  to  know  only  the 
cause  of  movement;  we  want  also  to  know 
its  direction.  Everywhere  in  history  the 
mind  seeks  for  signs  of  advance  in  some 
sense  and  on  the  other  hand  for  signs  of 
retrogression  or  decay.  It  cannot  be  asserted 
that  the  search  for  such  signs  is  not  an  his- 
torical inquiry.  But  in  all  such  inquiries 
it  is  impossible  to  eliminate  the  personal 
and  unhistorical  opinions  of  the  inquirer. 
He  can  only  state  what  he  sees.  Whatever 
exactly  be  his  theory  of  progress  he  can  only 
apply  it.  If  his  philosophy  show  him  pro- 
gress in  this  or  that  direction,  it  will  be 
worse  than  useless  falsification  for  him  to 
pretend  that  he  does  not  see  it.  And  it 
may  well  be  that  no  one,  either  on  historical 
or  on  any  other  grounds,  can  convict  him 
of  error.      So  wre  reach   rival   views   of  the 


A  Final  Difficulty.  207 

same  facts,  each  of  which  may  or   may  not 
be  correct. 

Again,  the  importance  of  any  fact  may  be 
said  to  vary  with  the  point  of  view  of  him 
who  sees  it.  In  surveying  the  same  group 
of  correlated  facts  one  writer  wTill  emphasise 
this  part  of  the  group,  another  that.  One 
writer  will  see  the  key  of  the  problem  here 
and  another  there.  The  relative  values  of 
the  different  features  of  the  group,  the 
perspective  of  the  group  as  a  whole,  will 
alter  according  as  the  point  of  view  is  Cath- 
olic or  Protestant,  aristocratic  or  democratic 
or  what  not.  And  it  will  be  impossible  to 
determine  the  amount  of  truth  or  error  in 
each  of  the  resulting  and  rival  presenta- 
tions without  first  determining  all  manner 
of  big  and  unhistorical  questions.  It  might 
be  argued  that,  to  judge  of  the  truth  of 
any  particular  view  of  any  particular  period 
of  history,  we  need  a  complete  synthetic 
philosophy  of  the  universe. 

The  teacher  may,  of  course,  try  in  practice 
to  distinguish  between  what  is  generally  re- 


208     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

cognised  as  knowledge  and  what  is  not.  He 
may  say :  Thus  and  thus  it  was,  and  more- 
over, thus  and  thus  it  seems  to  me  to  have 
been.  In  advanced  teaching  this  must  always 
be  done.  But  in  elementary  teaching,  where 
it  is,  perhaps,  most  needed,  the  distinction 
may  be  difficult  to  make  clear. 

It  is  as  well  to  commence  inquiry  into 
the  nature  of  this  difficulty  by  overstating 
it,  as  is  done  here.  But  the  difficulty  itself 
requires  illustration,  though,  indeed,  all  the 
history  books  yet  written  are  illustrations 
of  it  in  some  degree.  In  spite  of  this  fact, 
I  have  resolved  to  try,  by  means  of  an 
illustration,  to  bring  out  sharply  the  extent 
and  the  kind  of  difference  in  the  presenta- 
tion of  correlated  facts  that  may  be  made 
by  an  alteration  of  the  point  of  view.  To 
do  this  I  shall  take  what  is  called  the 
Keformation  and  treat  it  in  a  very  summary 
fashion  from  three  different  points  of  view 
in  turn.  These  three  summary  presenta- 
tions that  follow  are  not,  it  may  be  said, 
intended  to  be  minutely  accurate  any  more 


A  Final  Difficulty.  209 

than    they    are    intended   to   be   exhaustive. 
They  are  intended  to  illustrate  the  kind  of 
exaggerations,   the  kind  of  understatements, 
the    kind    of    omissions    consequent    on   the 
adoption    of  unscientific   points    of  view,  as 
well    as    the    more     profound     discrepancies 
arising  from  difference  in  the  point  of  view. 
They  are  intended,  however,  to  be  plausible. 
This  much  may  be  added  by  way  of  pre- 
face.     This  process  of  trying  to   see  things 
now  from   one  point  of  view  and  now  from 
another   is  a   necessary   process  in  historical 
thinking.       Only     it     must     be     undertaken 
deliberately    and    honestly,    and    you    must 
start  by  making   it   quite  clear   to    yourself 
what     assumptions     are     involved     in     each 
point  of  view  taken.     The   endeavour  to  do 
so    will    tend    to    clarify    all    your    thought. 
The     greatest     danger     of     thought    is     the 
presence    of   unrecognised    assumptions ;    its 
greatest     difficulty     is     the     detection     and 
definition  of  them. 


2IO 


XV. 
ILLUSTRATION   OF  THE  DIFFICULTY. 

THE   PREFORMATION    (a). 

What  we  call  the  English  Reformation  of 
the  sixteenth  century  had  its  definite  begin- 
nings in  the  fourteenth.  Whatever  social 
and  intellectual  service  the  earlier  Church 
had  rendered,  the  Church  of  the  fourteenth 
century,  at  least  in  England,  had  already 
become  an  obstructive  organisation  of  privi- 
lege and  superstition.  The  clergy  formed  a 
highly  privileged  class.  Their  crimes  could 
not  be  punished  by  the  methods  of  common 
law,  and  in  fact  were  not  punished  in  an 
adequate  manner  :  their  property  was  sacred 
to  an  extraordinary  degree.  Through  its 
special  courts  the  Church  exercised  a  legal 
power  of  interference  with  ordinary  lay  life. 


Illustration  of  the  Difficulty.     2 1 1 

It  claimed  that  its  excommunication  created 
a  kind  of  outlawry,  and  whether  the  state 
practically  recognised  this  or  not,  its  ex- 
communication might  be  held  to  invalidate 
a  marriage  or  a  will.  Questions  concerning 
the  validity  of  marriages  and  of  wills  were 
decided  in  the  courts  of  the  Church  by  a 
law  over  which  neither  king  nor  Parliament 
had  any  control.  The  canon  lawyers  had 
elaborated  a  law  of  marriage  which  made  it 
at  once  dangerously  easy  to  contract  a 
marriage  and  noxiously  difficult  to  contract 
one  that  could  not  be  invalidated.  It  was 
a  system  that  produced  a  maximum  of 
inconvenience  and  injustice,  and  served  no 
obvious  purpose  save  that  of  drawing  busi- 
ness to  the  Church  courts.  Already  the 
ecclesiastical  jurisdiction  was  detested,  and 
already  the  immunities  of  the  clergy  had 
begun  to  seem  absurd.  The  Church  was 
rich  and  its  wealth  was  ill -distributed  and 
ill-applied.  Most  of  it  was  in  the  hands  of 
bishops  and  chapters  and  a  few  great 
monasteries.     The  Church  had,  indeed,  failed 


2 1 2     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

to  establish  its  claim  to  immunity  from 
taxation ;  but  it  was  generally  believed  that 
it  escaped  its  proper  share  of  the  burden. 
The  bishops  were  practically  secular  mag- 
nates, living  in  luxury,  grasping,  sometimes, 
at  power  and  wealth,  statesmen,  perhaps, 
or  great  builders  or  patrons  of  learning — 
anything  rather  than  Christian  pastors.  And 
the  prelates  of  the  Church  tended  to  become 
identified  with  the  great  baronial  families. 
The  Church  was  fast  losing  that  democratic 
quality  which,  in  the  earlier  middle  ages, 
it  to  some  extent  possessed,  and  which  helps 
to  account  for  its  earlier  popularity.  It  was 
becoming  more  and  more  difficult  for  the 
poorly  born  man  to  rise  high  in  the  world 
by  taking  orders.  The  doctrinal  system  of 
the  Church  was  already  threadbare.  It  was 
tending  to  become  a  system  in  which 
personal  religion  disappeared  in  a  system 
of  sacramental  forms.  The  believer's  part 
was  to  conform,  the  Church's  part  to  save 
him.  The  Church  possessed  a  monopoly  of 
the  saving   grace  of  God   and   dispensed   it 


Illustration  of  the  Diffictdty \     213 

for  the  profit  of  the  clergy.  The  whole 
system  was  bound  up  with  doctrines  having 
no  foundation  either  in  reason  or  in  the 
Bible.  More  and  more,  in  the  fourteenth 
and  fifteenth  centuries,  Church  doctrine  took 
forms  calculated  to  draw  money  from  the 
faithful.  The  late  doctrine  of  the  treasury 
of  merits,  the  consequent  late  development 
of  the  doctrine  of  indulgence,  received  the 
approval  of  papal  practice  for  obvious 
reasons.  More  and  more  frankly  the  Church 
traded  on  superstition.  And  while  the 
doctrinal  system  of  the  Church  was  being 
thus  degraded,  its  authorities  were  en- 
deavouring more  systematically  than  ever 
to  suppress  thought  and  to  silence  criticism. 
They  set  their  faces  against  translations  of 
the  Bible  into  the  living  vernaculars  at  the 
very  time  when  Latin  was  ceasing  to  be 
a  living  language.  Above  and  behind  all 
this  is  the  Pope,  immersed  in  petty  French 
or  Italian  interests,  now  the  tool  of  the 
King  of  France,  now  a  triple-headed  monster, 
and  always,  from  the  English  point  of  view, 


214    Place  of  History  in  Education. 

an  interfering  foreigner.  He  claims  and  he 
actually  has  the  last  word  on  many  ques- 
tions that  concern  the  lives  of  English 
people.  He  claims  to  be  able  to  present 
to  English  benefices  and  to  tax  the  English 
clergy.  At  best  he  is  the  head  of  an  alien 
jurisdiction,  the  champion  of  clerical  privi- 
lege :  at  worst  he  is  John  XXIII.  or 
Alexander  VI. 

So  the  English  Reformation  began  with 
the  statutes  of  provisors,  the  attempt  to 
restrict  appeals  to  Rome,  the  great  prae- 
munire statute  of  1393,  and  the  dissolution 
of  the  alien  priories.  Popular  feeling  ex- 
pressed itself  in  attacks  on  clerical  property 
and  clerical  privilege.  Heresy  grew  and 
spread,  and  the  advanced  Lollards  denied 
every  doctrine  that  propped  the  actual 
position  of  the  clergy.  It  may  well  be 
that  only  the  anarchy  into  which  England 
fell  in  the  fifteenth  century  prevented  a 
very  destructive  reformation  of  the  Church 
in  that  age. 

At  the  commencement  of  the  sixteenth  cen- 


Illustration  of  the  Difficulty.     2 1 5 

tury  the  restored  monarchy  is  fast  developing 
a  practical  absolutism.  The  Church  is  weaker 
than  ever.  The  nobles  are  powerless  to 
protect  it,  even  if  they  would.  It  has  lost 
almost  all  its  hold  on  the  larger  towns  and 
on  the  mind  of  the  educated  class.  In  the 
higher  classes  even  the  most  convinced 
Catholics  are  disgusted  with  its  indulgences, 
its  fraudulent  miracles,  and  its  spiritual  clead- 
ness.  The  clergy  form  a  wealthy,  privileged 
body,  whose  privileges  have  few  defenders, 
and  whose  wealth  is  coveted.  Monasticism 
is  dying :  if  the  monasteries  were  not  the 
dens  of  iniquity  that  Henry  VIII.  tried  to 
make  them  out  to  be,  at  least  they  no 
longer  served  the  moral  or  spiritual  purposes 
of  the  age.  They  expressed  no  idealism  but 
that  of  the  most  backward  and  ignorant 
minds.  They  were  mere  anachronistic 
survivals,  and  they  had  to  be  destroyed 
before  the  Church  of  England  could  be  set 
on  a  foundation  at  once  national  and 
rational. 

Not  only  has   the  religion   of  the  Church 


2i6     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

ceased  to  be  the  religion  of  the  nation,  but 
for  a  long  time  past  the  Church  has  been 
more  and  more  visibly  repressive  of  religion. 
It  has  been  identifying  religion  with  the 
incredible,  and  making  rational  forms  of 
religion  impossible  by  suppressing  them  as 
heresy.  All  over  Western  Europe  the  more 
educated  classes  have  been  steadily  drifting 
into  sheer  paganism.  What  we  call  the 
renaissance  was  a  change  in  the  mental  tone 
and  attitude  of  the  upper  classes,  to  which 
the  Church  had  altogether  failed  to  adjust 
itself. 

The  growing  national  self  -  consciousness 
demanded  at  once  the  suppression  of  clerical 
privilege  and  the  liberation  of  the  English 
Church  from  Eome.  The  Church  had  to  be 
nationalised,  the  clergy  to  be  made  subject 
to  the  common  law,  the  doctrinal  system 
of  the  Church  had  to  be  brought  into  some 
degree  of  harmony  with  the  best  thought 
of  the  time.  The  power  to  impose  belief 
and  set  limits  to  thought  had  to  be  made 
one  with  the  power  of  the   State  and   used 


Illustration  of  the  Difficulty.     2 1 7 

for  national  purposes  or  not  at  all.  The 
religiousness  of  the  people  had  to  be 
allowed  to  run  into  the  forms  natural  to 
it.  The  Bible,  as  the  source  of  Christianity, 
had  to  be  disentangled  from  the  net  that 
had,  little  by  little,  been  woven  about  it 
by  interested  hands. 

Up  to  a  certain  point  the  change  was 
easy.  It  was  easy  to  renounce  the  Pope 
and  to  destroy  clerical  immunities,  but  new 
forms  for  the  religious  consciousness  were 
not  so  easily  arrived  at ;  there  is  friction 
and  muddle.  Tradition  dies  hard,  and  the 
gulf  between  the  educated  and  the  ignorant 
is  hard  to  bridge.  The  king  is  enormously 
strong,  and  has  his  own  views.  So,  under 
Henry  VIII.  the  Reformation  is  partial  and 
tentative.  The  arrangements  made  have, 
in  many  respects,  a  merely  provisional 
character,  and  the  whole  movement  is  to 
some  extent  perverted  to  base  uses.  Henry 
is  invested  with  dictatorial  powers  in  re- 
lation to  religion  and  the  Church,  greater 
even    than    those    the    Pope    had    claimed. 


218     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

The  old  doctrinal  system  is,  for  the  most 
part,  illogically  maintained,  and  Henry 
impartially  beheads  Catholics  for  treason, 
and  burns  Protestants  for  heresy. 

But  already  much  is  effected,  and  more 
is  implied.  The  denial  of  papal  authority 
involves  the  denial  that  there  is  any  power 
in  England  which  can  claim  to  restrain 
thought  and  settle  belief,  save  only  the 
power  of  the  Crown,  which  is  the  power  of 
England  itself.  The  State  may  and  it  will 
still  hold  to  the  ideal  of  national  unity  in 
religion ;  it  may  and  will  prescribe  forms 
of  worship  and  insist  on  conformity ;  it 
may  treat  opinion  as  crime,  but,  at  all 
events,  there  is  no  power  but  that  of  the 
State  to  do  these  things ;  and  the  State 
can  make  no  claim  to  pronounce  finaHy  as 
to  what  is  true  and  what  untrue.  Even 
Henry  VIII.  does  not  claim  infallibility. 
The  State  may,  and  does,  declare,  "  This 
you  must  not  deny  or  you  shall  be  burnt " ; 
it  cannot  declare,  "  This  you  must  believe 
or  be  damned."     Here  is  a  great  step  forward, 


Illustration  of  the  Difficulty.     219 

for  these  two  assertions  are  quite  different. 
The   Reformation   abolishes   for   England   an 
authority  which  claims  to   suppress  thought 
in  the  interests  of  truth  and  for  the  salva- 
tion of  souls.      Henceforth  if  there  is  to  be 
religious    persecution,    it    will    be    based    on 
considerations  of  national  order  and  security  ; 
there   remains  no  other  ground  on  which  it 
can  stand.     If  the  State  is  not  yet  ready  to 
concede    a    right    of    private    judgment    in 
matters   of  religion,   this  is  because  it   does 
not  feel  it  safe  to  do  so.     But  it  asserts  its 
own  right  of  judgment,   and  in  doing  so  it 
implies  the  larger  freedom.      Legal  religious 
toleration   is   now  certain   to   come  ;   it  is  a 
mere  matter  of  time  and  experience. 

The  merely  transitional  or  accidental 
features  of  the  work  of  Henry  VIII.  dis- 
appear in  the  Elizabethan  settlement,  which 
completes  it.  Every  one  is  now  bound  to 
go  to  church  and  nonconformist  congrega- 
tional worship  is  criminal.  But  if  you  do 
not  go  to  church  on  any  one  proper  occasion 
you  have  only   to   pay   a   shilling  fine,  and 


220    Place  of  History  in  Education. 

even  if  you  attend  nonconformist  worship, 
you  cannot,  at  all  events,  be  put  to  death 
for  so  doing.  Only  a  bare  conformity  is 
required ;  while,  on  the  other  hand,  the 
formularies  of  the  Church  are  so  drawn  as 
to  be  capable  of  subscription  by  all  but 
Romanists  or  extremists  among  Protestants. 
The  Elizabethan  Prayer-book  is  a  master- 
piece of  compromise,  and  its  practical 
excellence  lies  in  its  ambiguity.  But, 
ambiguous  as  it  is,  at  least  the  medieval 
doctrinal  system  is  thrown  overboard.  Even 
in  those  points  in  which  it  is  not  denounced 
it  receives  no  official  sanction.  Transubstan- 
tiation  is  formally  denounced ;  but  you  may 
lawfully  believe  in  consubstantiation,  just 
as  you  may  lawfully  take  a  more  thorough- 
going Protestant  view  of  the  great  sacrament. 
If  you  are  a  layman  the  law  has  really 
nothing  to  say  to  your  views  so  long  as 
you  outwardly  conform.  Within  wide  limits 
thought  is  legally  free. 

Christianity    is    relieved    of   its    handicap, 
gets,  in  this  sense,  a  fresh  start  and  another 


Illustration  of  the  Difficulty.     221 

chance.      It   had   been   in    danger    of   being 
altogether     lost    under    a    fantastic     super- 
structure.    Now,    at   least,   one  can  go  back 
to  the  originals,   to  the  gospels  themselves  ; 
and    one    has    them,    lawfully,    in    English. 
But    there     is    more     involved     than     this. 
Henceforth      religiousness     in     England     is 
bound     to     take     a     personal     form.      The 
Elizabethan     system,     while     it    limits     the 
right    of    private   judgment    in    practice,    at 
the    same    time,    by    the    vagueness    of   its 
formularies,    calls     for     the     exercise    of    it 
within  wide  limits.     There  is  no  longer  any 
question    of    an    infallible    authority.      You 
must    determine    the    detail    of  your   beliefs 
for  yourself  if  you  want  them  detailed.     You 
must    work    out    your    own    salvation.      No 
priest    can    forgive    your    sins   or    save    you 
through    ceremonies.      You    stand    on    your 
own  feet   and  there   is    no   longer   anything 
that  can   claim   to   stand   between    you    and 
God.      This   change    is    the    essence    of   the 
Reformation. 


222     Place  of  History  in  Education. 


THE    REFORMATION  (6). 

Not  to  go  still  further  back,  we  may  say 
that  all  through  the  middle  ages  the  Church 
was  fighting  for  two  great  principles.  In 
the  first  place  it  maintained  the  supremacy 
of  the  spiritual  power  over  all  things  tem- 
poral. The  spiritual  power  was  embodied  in 
the  Church  itself,  an  institution  divinely 
founded  and  divinely  guided,  at  once  the 
repository  and  the  interpreter  of  revelation, 
the  keeper  of  the  sacred  book  that  was  the 
light  of  the  world.  But  behind  and  in- 
volved in  the  assertion  of  the  authority  of 
the  Church  was  the  assertion  of  an  eternal 
and  absolute  principle  of  right,  before  which 
all  mere  legal  and  technical  rights,  all  mere 
temporal  authorities,  kings  or  magistrates, 
must  give  way  and  to  which  they  must  be 
conformed.  This  is  the  essential  assertion  of 
the  Church,  that  such  a  principle  of  right 
exists,  and  the  Church  claims  authority  as 
the  appointed   interpreter  of  that  principle, 


Illustration  of  the  Difficulty.     223 

and  on  no  other  ground.  Along  with  this 
goes  the  assertion  that  there  are  certain 
truths  concerning  the  nature  of  man  and 
his  relation  to  God,  knowledge  of  which  is 
necessary  to  all  souls  if  they  would  not  be 
lost  in  the  dark  wilderness  of  the  universe. 
Concerning  these  truths  man  has  not  been 
left  without  a  guide,  and  his  guide  is  the 
inspired  Church,  which  is  able  to  lead  him 
into  all  truth,  whereas  his  unaided  reason 
can  find  no  truth  at  all. 

On  these  first  assertions,  that  there  is 
knowledge  necessary  for  salvation,  that  there 
are  eternal  principles  of  right,  and  that  the 
Church  is  the  inspired  guardian  of  those 
principles  and  of  that  knowledge,  a  second 
great  assertion  is  founded.  It  is  that 
Christendom,  as  such,  is  a  natural  unity,  a 
natural  State,  because  in  the  Church  all 
Christendom  is  one.  All  Christian  society 
owns  the  same  fundamental  law,  recognises 
the  same  essential  principles.  Diversity  of 
laws,  diversity  of  kingdoms  and  states,  is 
an  evil,  and  indeed  illogical.     It  exists  only 


224     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

because  the  nominally  Christian  world  is 
not  really  Christian.  The  triumph  of  the 
Church  will  mean  the  union  of  Christendom 
and  ultimately  of  mankind.  The  Church  is 
working  to  establish  the  Divine  State,  Civitas 
Dei,  the  Kingdom  of  God  upon  earth.  The 
end  of  that  State  is  the  highest  good  of 
mankind :  and  this  is  life  eternal  in  con- 
formity with  the  will  of  God.  The  earthly 
end  of  society  is  peace,  "  the  peace  of  the 
rational  soul,"  as  St  Augustine  put  it ;  an 
ordered  harmony  in  which  man  may  con- 
template and  learn  and  draw  nearer  to  God. 
In  the  Christian  Church,  at  last,  all  mankind 
will  be  one ;  all  class  distinctions  and  race 
distinctions  will  be  trivial,  all  rulers  will  be 
servants  and  every  serf  a  disciple  of  Christ. 
This  was  the  practical  ideal  to  which  the 
Church  pointed,  and  which  it  strove  to  im- 
pose on  men's  minds. 

But  the  Church  failed  to  conquer,  that 
is,  it  failed  to  convert,  the  world.  Every- 
where the  mass  of  people  remained  un- 
believing,   or   only  half  believing,   entangled 


Illustration  of  the  Difficulty.     225 

in  their  petty  personal  aims  and  needs. 
Everywhere  the  upspringing  of  the  good 
seed  was  choked  by  the  tares.  To  save 
itself  from  being  altogether  secularised  and 
so  destroyed,  to  prevent  its  clergy  and 
bishops  from  becoming  hereditary  or  from 
becoming  mere  nominees  of  secular  magnates, 
the  Church  was  forced  to  forbid  its  clergy 
marriage  and  to  centralise  its  authority  in 
the  Pope.  It  was  forced  to  insist  on  immu- 
nity for  its  clergy  from  the  jurisdiction  of  lay 
courts,  because  these  courts  represented  prin- 
ciples more  or  less  antagonistic  to  those  of  the 
Church,  and  because  the  Church  could  not 
admit  the  supremacy  of  a  law  it  did  not  itself 
sanction.  It  was  forced  to  claim  immunity 
from  taxation  because  power  to  tax  is  power 
to  destroy.  To  have  admitted  the  supremacy 
of  mere  state  -  made  law  would  have  been 
an  abandonment  of  the  essential  principles 
of  the  Church.  It  would  have  been  to 
accept  the  division  of  Christendom,  and  to 
have  acknowledged  that  the  State,  as  such, 
is  the  judge  of  its  own  rights.     The  Church 

p 


226    Place  of  History  in  Education. 

could  no  more  admit  the  supremacy  of  the 
medieval  state  than  the  early  Christian 
could  sacrifice  to  Csesar.  It  was,  in  fact, 
the  old  question  in  a  new  form. 

But,  of  course,  the  Church  failed.  The 
growth  of  the  national  states  rent  Europe 
and  the  Church  in  pieces.  The  dream  of  a 
European  unity  faded  in  face  of  the  plain 
impossibility  of  its  realisation.  Already  in 
the  fifteenth  century  the  inter -state  right 
asserted  by  the  medieval  Church  is  becoming 
the  right  of  every  state  to  take  all  it  can  get. 
The  Church's  ideal  of  peace  is  replaced  by 
Machiavelli's  grim  implication — asserted  later 
in  so  many  words  by  Hobbes  —  that  the 
natural  relation  between  any  two  states  is 
one  of  war.  Justice  becomes  law,  and  the 
law  of  a  legislative  power  over  which  the 
Church  has  little  or  no  control.  As  the 
national  states  define  themselves,  the  Church 
becomes  more  and  more  disorganised.  Its 
disintegration  begins  long  before  the  Refor- 
mation. The  clergy  themselves  are  infected 
by   that    national    sentiment   which    is    the 


Illustration  of  the  Difficulty.     227 

mother  of  schisms.  The  local  Churches 
begin  to  think  of  themselves  as  national ; 
the  bishops,  forgetting  Anselm  and  Becket, 
become  servants  of  the  king.  Heresy  in- 
creases and  paganism  revives.  As  early  as 
the  beginning  of  the  fourteenth  century  a 
French  king  has  the  audacity  to  try  to  make 
of  the  Papacy  an  instrument  for  the  advance- 
ment of  French  monarchy.  In  pagan  fif- 
teenth-century Italy,  the  Pope  himself  tends 
to  become  a  pagan.  In  the  general  failure 
of  faith  the  Church  loses  faith  also.  This  is 
the  fault  of  the  Church,  that  it  lost  faith  and 
forsook  its  ideal. 

The  Eeformation  is  the  nemesis,  but  a 
nemesis  not  only  for  the  Church  but  for  all 
the  peoples  of  Western  Europe.  The  Church 
had  pointed  the  way  to  a  European  hege- 
mony :  the  peoples  refused  to  follow  it.  The 
Church  had  upheld  the  supremacy  of  the 
things  of  the  spirit,  and  Europe  followed 
after  the  flesh.  It  is  the  nemesis  of  failure 
in  idealism,  of  narrow  views,  of  racial  feeling, 
of  irrational  dislikes  and  jealousies,  of  short- 


228    Place  of  History  in  Education. 

sightedness  and  a  petty  mind.  The  Church 
is  torn  in  pieces.  What  takes  its  place? 
There  is  nothing  to  take  its  place.  Europe 
becomes  an  anarchy  of  immitigably  hostile 
states. 

If  it  were  good  for  man  that  Europe 
should  be  split  into  a  series  of  independent 
warring  states,  bound  together  by  no  prin- 
ciple, acknowledging  no  superior,  making 
each  a  god  of  its  own  material  interests, 
recognising  no  higher  law,  taking  The  Prince 
for  its  gospel,  and,  true  to  its  principles, 
denouncing  its  prophet,  then  the  failure  of 
the  Church,  of  which  the  Reformation  is 
the  issue,  was,  without  doubt,  good  for  man. 
At  the  Reformation  the  European  states 
finally  declared  and  established  their  inde- 
pendence. In  doing  so  they  had  to  abandon 
far  more  than  a  dream  of  European  unity. 
They  forswore  the  principle  of  right  as 
between  state  and  state :  they  disowned 
religion  itself.  The  nations  asserted  that 
state  rights  and  state  interests,  as  such,  are 
primary  and  above   all   other  considerations. 


Illustration  of  the  Difficulty.     229 

But  the  interest  of  a  state,  as  such,  is  not 
the  good  of  mankind,  nor  anything  that 
can  be  called  the  salvation  of  souls.  The 
Reformation  marks  the  triumph  of  the  prin- 
ciple of  competition  in  inter-state  relations. 
In  denying  the  authority  of  the  Church  the 
nations  denied  the  existence  of  national 
obligation  and  disabled  Christianity  itself. 

It  is  matter  of  course  that  they  did 
not,  at  the  time,  know  that  they  were 
doing  these  things.  Protestantism  repre- 
sents an  attempt  to  reconcile  Christianity 
with  the  absolutism  of  the  State.  The 
futility  of  such  an  attempt  would  have 
been  obvious  but  for  the  strength  of  the 
desires  and  interests  it  subserved.  The 
whole  history  of  Protestantism  goes  to 
prove  that  Christianity  stood  or  fell  with 
the  Church.  From  the  outset  the  Protestant 
churches  had  no  rational  basis.  They  started 
by  repudiating  their  only  possible  basis — 
the  authority  and  tradition  of  the  Church 
itself.  They  appealed  from  the  Church  to 
the   Bible,    ignoring    the   fact    that   without 


230     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

the  Church  there  is  no  Bible  at  all.  It 
was  the  Church  which  had  selected  those 
Greek  and  Hebrew  books  which  make  up 
the  Bible.  If  belief  in  their  inspiration 
did  not  rest  on  the  authority  of  the 
Church,  upon  what  did  it  rest  ?  To  repudi- 
ate the  authority  of  the  Church  was,  in 
the  long-run,  inevitably,  to  repudiate  the 
Bible  also.  It  was  natural  that  men  who 
had  been  brought  up  as  Christians,  and 
were,  indeed,  actually  Christians,  should  fail 
to  see  that  they  were  logically  bound  to  re- 
pudiate Christianity  along  with  the  Church. 
They  clutched  at  the  Bible  as  a  drowning 
man  clutches  at  a  straw.  Soon  the  deep 
waters  closed  over  them.  Ever  since  the 
Reformation  the  Protestant  churches  have 
been  drifting  towards  latitudinarianism,  uni- 
tarianism,  agnosticism,  and  the  drift  away 
from  Christianity  has  only  been  partially 
arrested  by  the  desire  to  retain  the  endow- 
ments and  privileges  they  secured  by  their 
surrender  to  the  State. 

The  Christian  Church  had  begun  by  defy- 


Illustration  of  the  Difficulty.     231 

ing  Caesar.  It  refused  to  admit  that  the 
will  of  Caesar  made  absolute  law ;  it  asserted 
a  higher  law  to  which  that  will  must  con- 
form itself.  All  through  the  centuries  that 
followed  the  collapse  of  the  Eoman  Empire 
the  Church  was  striving  to  establish  that 
higher  law.  But  in  the  sixteenth  century, 
over  a  great  part  of  Europe,  at  last  the 
Church  surrenders.  It  does  sacrifice  to 
Csesar.  Henceforth  its  ideals  are  those  of 
the  State,  which  defines  its  doctrine,  limits 
its  action,  pays  its  ministers,  appoints  its 
bishops.  The  reformers  had  fondly  imagined 
they  were  releasing  it  from  bondage  to  the 
Pope ! 

The  Reformation,  it  is  true,  was  not 
wholly  destructive.  What  it  helped  to  build 
or  to  strengthen  was,  however,  simply  the 
modern  state.  Calvinism,  indeed,  tried  to 
escape  the  inevitable  by  a  new  identification 
of  Church  and  State,  by  establishing  a  gov- 
ernment of  the  righteous,  a  reign  of  the 
saints.  But  such  identification  as  it 
aimed    at    proved    in    the   long-run    to   be 


232     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

impossible,  and  Calvinism  directly  produced 
nothing,  politically,  but  short-lived  and  re- 
actionary tyrannies. 

If  one  looks  at  England  in  particular,  the 
destructive,  the  illogical,  the  irreligious 
character  of  the  Reformation  is  there  as 
apparent  as  everywhere  else ;  the  State  is 
the  only  gainer.  There  is  a  political  and 
legal  and  social  change  of  great  importance  : 
and  it  is  essentially  political,  legal,  and 
social.  The  government  plunders  the  Church 
of  its  property,  turns  its  bishops  into  royal 
officials,  assumes  power  to  dictate  doctrine 
and  settle  ritual  as  it  pleases,  and  bribes 
the  landowning  class  with  the  spoil  of  the 
monasteries.  The  destruction  of  the  monas- 
teries involves  not  merely  much  temporary 
misery,  but  the  loss  of  a  series  of  magnifi- 
cent monuments  of  medieval  art,  the  aesthetic 
value  of  which  it  is  permissible  to  regard 
as  greater  than  that  of  all  the  art  work  of 
the  renaissance.  Finally,  the  Elizabethan 
compromise  is  arranged,  and  the  best  its 
apologists  seem  able  to  say  for  it  is  that  it 


Illustration  of  the  Difficulty.     233 

involved  an  approach  to  state  toleration  in 
religion,  and  that  its  formularies  were  so 
vague  as  to  mean  practically  nothing.  It 
is  described  as  a  masterly  compromise  which 
saved  the  country  from  civil  war ;  but,  in 
fact,  it  did  not  even  do  that :  the  civil  war 
came  less  than  a  hundred  years  later.  In 
any  case  what  gain  is  there  for  religion  or 
for  thought  ?  You  get  a  Church  the 
"  articles "  of  which  favour  Protestantism, 
but  are  so  worded  that  a  not  too  consistent 
Catholic  can  say  he  believes  them ;  the 
liturgy  of  which  tries  to  look  as  though  it 
were  Catholic  and  does  not  dare  to  be  so  ; 
the  rubrics  of  which  are  so  vague  and  con- 
fused that  no  one  has  ever  been  able  to  be 
sure  of  what  precisely  they  mean.  And 
doctrine,  liturgy,  and  rubrics  alike  are  at 
the  mercy  of  Parliament. 

It  is  claimed  that  the  Reformation, 
indirectly  but  necessarily,  freed  thought 
and  led  to  the  establishment  of  legal  religious 
toleration.  Very  indirectly  was  it  so,  if  at 
all.      The    dogmatism   of  the   reformers  was 


234     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

at  least  as  great  as  that  of  the  Church.     "It 
is    certain,"    wrote    Luther,    "that    whoever 
does  not    hold    with    me    will    be    damned 
eternally."      In  England,  toleration  was  the 
result   not  of    the   Reformation   but    of   the 
great   struggle   of  the    seventeenth   century. 
Its  establishment  involved  the  breakdown  of 
the    Elizabethan    system.      As    a   matter   of 
fact,    the    Reformation    led    everywhere    to 
religious  persecution.     Under  Wolsey,  books 
were    burnt,    but    not    men.       It    was    the 
Reformation   that   brought   into  fashion  the 
burning    of    heretics.       The    State    assumes 
absolute   control   of  the  Church,  and  heresy 
logically  becomes  a  crime  against  the  State. 
Toleration    was    in    no    real    sense    a    result 
of  the   efforts   of  the   religious  reformers  of 
the  sixteenth  century.      It   resulted   simply 
from  the  discovery,  through  bitter  experience, 
that   national    unity   in    religion    was   unat- 
tainable   and    that    the    effort    to    attain    it 
involved   chronic  civil  war.      It   had  always 
been  the  State  which  burned  heretics  when 
they    were    burned,  —  and    this    not    merely 


Illustration  of  the  Difficulty.     235 

in  a  technical  sense  but  for  its  own  pur- 
poses. Wycliffe  died  in  his  bed  in  spite  of 
papal  anathema  and  prosecution ;  and  if 
later  Lollards  were  burned  it  was  rather 
as  dangerous  social  revolutionaries  than 
as  heretics.  Protestants  habitually  attribute 
to  the  Church  much  for  which  the  Church 
as  such  was  in  no  way  responsible.  They 
refer  one  to  the  Spanish  Inquisition !  But 
the  Spanish  Inquisition  was  a  state -made, 
state-controlled  machine,  established  in  de- 
fiance of  the  Pope  and  used  to  destroy  the 
freedom  of  the  Church  itself  and  to  increase 
the  royal  power  in  Spain.  The  real  fact, 
indeed,  is  that  the  Spanish  Inquisition  was 
an  essentially  Protestant  institution. 

The  only  religious  revival  of  the  sixteenth 
century  of  any  value  in  the  long-run  was 
the  Catholic  revival  expressed  in  the  re- 
formed Papacy,  the  Jesuits  and  the  Coun- 
cil of  Trent.  On  the  religious  side  the 
Reformation  was  the  Counter-Reformation. 


236     Place  of  History  in  Education. 


THE   REFORMATION    (c). 

People  brought  up  in  a  Protestant  tradi- 
tion are  especially  likely  to  find  it  difficult 
to  understand  the  Keformation.  They  are 
taught  from  the  outset  to  regard  the 
Reformation  as  having  essentially  consisted 
in  the  development  of  the  various  forms  of 
Protestantism.  But  the  complex  body  of 
changes  which  we  roughly  summarise  as 
"  the  Reformation  "  can  never  be  understood 
on  this  theory.  The  common  and  popular 
error  in  dealing  with  what  is  called 
the  Reformation  consists  in  starting  from 
an  assumption  that  the  Reformation  was 
primarily  and  essentially  concerned  with 
religion  and  religious  systems  of  thought. 
The  Reformation,  we  are  told,  was  a  rebellion 
against  Catholic  doctrine  or  against  the 
claims  of  the  Pope.  It  was  a  restatement 
of  Christianity,  a  return  to  the  Bible  or  a  re- 
turn to  the  early  Church.  It  was  an  assertion 
of  essential  Christianity  as  against  a  barbarous 


Illustration  of  the  Difficulty.     237 

and  fantastic  travesty.  By  persons  less  in- 
clined to  lay  stress  on  the  importance  of  dog- 
matic religion,  we  are  told  that  the  Reformation 
was  in  the  main  a  moral  revolt,  a  revolt 
against  iniquity  in  high  places,  an  assertion 
that  personal  righteousness  is  the  one  thing 
needful.  All  such  statements  equally  miss 
the  main  point.  The  Reformation  was 
neither  essentially  religious  nor  essentially 
moral.  It  might  be  more  true  to  say  that 
it  was  essentially  non-moral  and  irreligious. 
It  was,  in  truth,  essentially  social  and 
political. 

The  collapse  of  the  Roman  Empire  involved 
a  period  of  chaos.  For  a  long  time  life, 
property,  and  institutions  were  alike  ex- 
tremely insecure.  But  at  every  moment 
there  is  a  striving  after  order  and  security. 
As  the  social  settlements  become  definitive, 
as  the  great  immigrations  of  barbarians 
cease,  the  struggle  becomes  more  hopeful. 
There  is,  as  a  matter  of  course,  talk  of 
reviving  the  Roman  Empire.  Efforts  are 
even   deliberately   made    to   that   end.      But 


238     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

all  such  talk  was  nonsensical.  Difficulties 
of  transport  and  communication,  difficulties 
of  language  and  racial  habit  and  law,  made 
any  sort  of  European  fusion  or  order  an 
impossibility.  Order  and  security  could  only 
be  established  from  a  number  of  independent 
centres.  All  efforts  to  create  a  central  control 
for  Christendom  ended  by  merely  creating 
friction  and  increasing  disorder.  The  Roman 
Empire  of  the  middle  ages  was  a  mere  fiction, 
a  dream  with  hardly  the  substance  of  a 
dream.  But  the  Hildebrandine  dream  of 
a  Christendom  united  in  the  Church  was 
equally  a  baseless  vision.  It  had  no  real 
relation  to  the  facts.  To  think  of  Christen- 
dom as  such  as  a  natural  state  was  to  be 
the  victim  of  a  grossly  exaggerated  notion 
of  the  power  and  place  of  religion  in  the 
life  of  man.  Christendom  was  itself  a  fiction. 
In  no  profound  religious  sense  was  Europe 
ever  Christian  at  all.  Had  all  Europe  desired 
what  Hildebrand  desired,  something  might 
have  been  achieved ;  though  even  then 
difficulties  of  transit  and  of  language  would 


Illustration  of  the  Difficulty.     239 

have  proved  an  insurmountable  barrier  to 
any  effectual  union.  But  as  very  few  people 
indeed  really  desired  anything  of  the  sort, 
the  ideal  of  the  Papacy  was  almost  as  mere 
a  dream  as  that  of  the  Empire. 

Nevertheless,  the  Church  for  a  long  time 
served  the  cause  of  law  and  order.  It  gave 
a  new  moral  sanction  to  law,  it  gave  its  aid 
to  secular  powers  struggling  to  keep  the 
peace,  it  consecrated  the  king,  it  upheld  an 
ideal  of  order  and  unity  and  peace,  it  helped 
to  keep  Latin  as  the  language  of  Christendom. 
By  performing  these  and  other  services  it 
acquired  wealth  and  privilege,  jurisdictions 
and  immunities  and  an  international  recos- 
nition.  But  the  monarchies,  or  some  of 
them,  outgrew  the  Church.  They  became 
strong  enough  to  stand  on  their  own  feet 
without  the  crutches  of  religion.  They  began 
to  treat  the  Church  as  its  superiors  and  to 
try  to  master  it.  Gradually,  from  the  point 
of  view  of  the  growing  secular  monarchies, 
the  Church  becomes  an  obstruction  in  the 
path,  a  hindrance  to  co-operation,  a  restraint 


240    Place  of  History  in  Education. 

on  the  action  of  the  central  power.  There  is 
a  long  struggle.  People  have  spoken  of 
WyclifTe  as  the  "morning  star  of  the  Refor- 
mation," or  declared  that  the  Reformation 
began  for  England  in  the  fourteenth  century. 
These  ideas  arise  merely  from  the  Protestant 
association  of  the  Reformation  with  doctrinal 
systems  adverse  to  that  of  Rome.  The 
Reformation  had  begun  for  England  when 
Henry  II.  drew  up  the  Constitutions  of 
Clarendon ;  it  had  begun  when  Henry  I. 
defeated  or  successfully  evaded  the  vast 
undefined  claims  that  underlay  the  opposition 
of  Anselm ;  it  had  begun  when  William  I. 
ruled  that  his  barons  were  not  to  be  excom- 
municated by  the  Pope  without  his  leave 
given.  The  Reformation  is  merely  the  final 
and  decisive  phase  of  an  age-long  struggle 
between  the  secular  and  the  ecclesiastical 
powers. 

The  sixteenth  century  is  the  age  of  the 
definitive  triumph  of  the  national  monarchies 
and  of  the  secular  power  in  all  its  forms, 
in  West  Europe  generally.      That  definitive 


Illustration  of  the  Difficulty.     24 1 

victory  is  the  Reformation.  Or  if  this  way 
of  putting  the  fact  be  regarded  as  too 
flagrantly  at  variance  with  the  common  use 
of  the  term,  then  we  must  say  that  the 
Reformation,  the  strictly  "  religious "  Refor- 
mation, is  merely  a  comparatively  unim- 
portant aspect  of  this  victory  of  the  secular 
power.  Everywhere  the  Reformation  meant 
a  nationalisation  or  at  least  a  secularisation 
of  the  Church.  To  associate  it  with  Pro- 
testantism is  merely  misleading.  It  had 
really  only  an  accidental  and  circumstantial 
connection  either  with  Protestantism  or  with 
Catholicism.  It  took  place,  in  greater  or 
less  degree,  in  Catholic  and  Protestant 
countries  alike.  Francis  I.'s  concordat  with 
the  Pope  in  1516,  whereby  the  appointment 
of  all  bishops  in  France  was  given  to  the 
Crown  and  his  Ordinance  of  Villers  Coterets 
in  1539,  curtailing  ecclesiastical  jurisdiction, 
involved  changes  exactly  similar  to  those 
effected  by  Henry  VIII.  in  England.  In 
Protestant  Germany  the  princes  secularise — 
that  is  to  say,  appropriate — church  property, 

Q 


242     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

dissolve  the  monasteries,  subject  the  clergy 
to  their  tribunals,  turn  the  bishops  into 
nominees  of  their  own.  But  Ferdinand 
of  Austria  equally  dissolves  monasteries 
and  appropriates  the  property,  and  every 
"  Catholic  "  German  prince  went  as  far  as  he 
dared  in  the  same  direction.  In  Spain  the 
king  established  control  over  his  clergy  by 
means  of  the  Inquisition,  and  nothing  but 
Protestant  tradition  prevents  us  from  seeing 
the  Inquisition  as  the  great  instrument  of 
the  Reformation  in  Spain.  The  so  -  called 
Protestant  states  are  merely  those  in  which 
the  subjugation  of  the  Church  by  the  secular 
power  is  most  complete  and  most  formal. 

In  all  this  religion  as  such  plays  a  very 
small  part.  The  closer  you  get  to  the 
facts  of  the  Reformation  in  any  country, 
the  less  you  will  see  of  religion  as  a  factor 
therein.  Princes  follow  the  lines  of  least 
resistance  and  are  Protestant  or  Catholic 
as  circumstances  dictate.  Is  there  a  single 
instance  of  a  "Protestant"  prince  whose 
interests     were     not     bound    up    with    the 


Illustration  of  the  Difficulty.     243 

triumph    of    Protestantism,    or    of   a    prince 
remaining  Catholic  in  spite  of  his  interests? 
It     is    indeed     probably     true     that     every 
"Catholic"  prince   in    Germany,   except   the 
emperor,   would   have   become    "  Protestant " 
had  he  dared.    On  the  whole  the  sovereigns 
of   Europe    were   inclined   to   Protestantism, 
because    it    enabled    them    to    plunder    the 
Church    and    to    efface    it    as    an    obstacle. 
Francis    I.    patronised  Protestantism  just  as 
long   as   he   felt   it   safe   to   do   so.     But  in 
France  Protestantism  became  identified  with 
provincial  separatism,   and  so  prevented  the 
Reformation  from  going  further  than  it  did  go. 
But   it   is   not   a   question   of  the  princes 
only.      With   the   masses   it    was   at   bottom 
the  same.      The  "  religious  opinions  "  of  the 
masses  were,  as  they  always  are,  determined 
not    by   religious    aspirations   or   by   contro- 
versy, but  by  local  needs  and  convenience. 
Protestantism  became  the  religion  of  all  those 
to   whom,  for   all    manner   of  circumstantial 
reasons,   Protestantism  was   convenient.      In 
city  after  city  Protestantism  appears  merely 


244    Place  of  Histo/y  in  Education. 

as  the   last  phase    of   an   age-long  struggle 
against    its    bishop.       Geneva    became    the 
very   capital   of  Protestantism ;    but   it   was 
so   even   at   Geneva.      For   an   age  past  the 
city  had  been  struggling  against  its  bishop's 
claims    to    sovereignty.      In    the    early    six- 
teenth    century     the     bishop,     unable     any 
longer    to    maintain    his    claim    without    as- 
sistance    from    without,    had    obtained    the 
support  of  the  Duke  of  Savoy.     The  object 
of    the    Duke    was    of    course    to    establish 
himself  as  sovereign   in   the   city.      The  re- 
public was  hard  pressed.     That  under  these 
circumstances   it   should    become    Protestant 
is   a   mere   matter   of  course.      On   the   one 
hand  the  bishop's  claims  could  be  far  more 
radically    and    effectively    dealt    with    on    a 
Protestant    than    on    a    Catholic    basis ;    on 
the    other,    the    support    of    the    Protestant 
Swiss   cantons   against   the   Duke    of   Savoy 
could    not    be     easily     obtained     on     other 
terms.     So,  and  for  no  other  reason,  Geneva 
became    Protestant.      Is    any    one    prepared 
seriously  to  maintain  that  the  Geneva  popu- 


Illustration  of  the  Difficulty.     245 

lace  was  won  over  by  the  sheer  power  of 
the  word  of  Farel  or  of  Calvin  ?  Their 
preaching  prevailed  because  its  pratical  drift 
coincided  with  the  desires  of  the  citizens 
of  Geneva.  Calvin's  dictatorship  at  Geneva 
is  essentially  similar  to  the  "tyranny" 
established  in  some  hard  -  pressed  Italian 
city  in  the  fourteenth  century. 

Protestantism  is  in  fact  a  mere  by-pro- 
duct of  the  Reformation.  It  is  an  attempt 
to  readjust  religious  conceptions  to  a  new 
political  and  social  order.  The  medieval 
system  of  society,  already  for  long  broken 
up  and  disorganised,  is  being  violently  swept 
away,  and  various  religious  systems  emerge 
as  by-products  of  the  revolution  or  as  neces- 
sities of  the  new  conditions.  In  themselves 
they  involve  no  kind  of  intellectual  advance. 

Nor  is  there  much  truth  in  the  assertion 
that  Protestantism  made  for  religious  tolera- 
tion. The  first  effect  of  the  Reformation 
was  to  make  toleration  impossible  and  to 
produce  persecutions  on  a  scale  and  of  a 
severity  impossible  under  the  earlier  system. 


246     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

Yet  on  this  point,  too,  much  popular  mis- 
conception exists.  It  may  fairly  be  said 
that  there  never  was  such  a  thing  as  re- 
ligious persecution.  No  government,  that 
is,  ever  persecuted  a  religion  from  a  zeal  for 
truth  or  for  the  sake  of  the  salvation  of 
souls.  Men  would  have  to  be  very  much 
more  religious  than  they  have  ever  been 
to  make  religious  persecution  possible.  So- 
called  religious  persecutions  are  the  outcome 
of  political  and  social  conflicts  in  which 
religion  is  the  merest  incident.  The  greatest 
"religious  persecutions"  Europe  has  known 
were  an  outcome  of  the  Reformation. 


247 


XVI. 

CONCLUSION. 

Historical  truth  is  a  highly  complex  thing ; 
and  partly  because  of  its  complexity,  partly 
for  lack  of  evidence,  it  can  never  be  given 
anything  like  complete  definition.  From 
any  point  of  view  you  may  catch  a  partial 
glimpse,  you  may  see  a  real  aspect  of  the 
many-sided,  indefinable  fact.  But  a  partial 
truth  is  not  a  truth.  It  is  in  fact  what 
Dr  Johnson  would  have  called  a  lie.  Before 
truth  is  attained  all  our  partial  glimpses 
have  to  be  combined  in  a  single,  complex, 
and  comprehensive  statement.  But  views  so 
contradictory  as  those  expressed  in  the  fore- 
going statements  concerning  the  Reformation 
cannot  be  logically  combined.  Are  we 
doomed,   by  the  constitution  of  our   minds, 


248     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

to  arrive  at  nothing  but  a  series  of  "  views  " 
which  will  not  combine  and  yet  which  can- 
not, severally,  be  convicted  of  falsehood? 

Which  of  these  three  ways,  for  instance,  of 
looking  at  the  facts  of  the  Reformation  is 
the  right  one  ?  We  may  say  at  once  that 
we  do  not  know  and  that,  as  historians,  we 
do  not  care.  From  the  historian's  point  of 
view  all  three  statements  are  manifestly  in 
the  wrong.  It  is  not  that  they  suffer  from 
over  -  emphasis  or  from  compression.  The 
emphasis  is  deliberate  and  the  compression 
is  unavoidable.  Our  objection  to  them  is 
not  based  on  their  numerous  sins  of  omission 
or  of  commission  in  detail.  We  object  to 
them  simply  because  they  are  essentially 
unhistorical  statements.  All  three  involve 
assumptions  as  to  what  is  good  for  mankind, 
in  the  mass  or  individually,  which,  whether 
justified  or  not,  lie  far  beyond  the  scope  of 
historical  inquiry.  The  assumption  that  the 
liberation  of  religious  thought  or  the  religious 
sense  is  supremely  important,  the  assumption 
that  the  recognition  of  a  higher  law  than  that 


Conclusion.  249 

of  the  State  is  supremely  important,  the 
assumption  that  the  difference  between 
religious  opinions  is  the  difference  between 
Tweedledum  and  Tweedledee,  to  all  these 
and  all  similar  assumptions  history  has 
nothing  whatever  to  say.  They  are,  from 
the  historian's  point  of  view,  pure  irrelevan- 
cies.  When  from  these  three  "  views "  of 
the  Reformation  we  have  eliminated  all  such 
irrelevancies,  we  shall  probably  find  that 
they  are  susceptible  of  reconciliation. 

Every  science  has  a  borderland.  When  we 
come  to  determine  the  importance  a  par- 
ticular change  has  for  humanity  we  have 
reached  the  absolute  frontier  of  history ; 
and,  as  historians,  there  we  must  stop.  If 
we  do  not  stop  there,  we  shall  inevitably  set 
about  answering  the  question  by  means  of 
considerations  which  may  or  may  not  be 
philosophically  sound,  but  which  are  certainly 
unhistorical.  We  have  reached  the  point 
at  which  history  begins  to  merge  into  some- 
thing larger.  In  every  science  it  is  the 
same :    you  come  to  a  point  at  which  your 


250    Place  of  History  in  Education. 

inquiry  becomes  part  of  a  question  which 
does  not  wholly  belong  to  your  science. 
History  can  and  will  throw  light  on  these 
questions  as  to  what  constitutes  progress  for 
humanity.  It  cannot  pretend  to  resolve 
them  save  in  an  arbitrarily  limited  sense. 
History  is  essentially  concerned  with  change 
and  the  causes  of  change.  With  the  direc- 
tion of  change  it  is  concerned  only  so  far 
as  this  can  be  determined  by  purely  histori- 
cal inquiries. 

"  If,"  some  one  will  probably  say,  "  we 
are  to  study  causation  simply,  and  in  doing 
so  are  to  suppress  as  irrelevant  all  our 
notions  of  what  is  good  and  what  is  evil 
in  the  largest  sense,  how  are  we  ever  to 
discriminate  between  what  is  important 
and  what  is  not  ?  We  shall  have  no 
measure  of  values  at  all.  Every  measure 
of  value  implies  a  philosophy  of  life.  Would 
you  have  us  assume  that  all  changes  are 
equally  important  ?  In  that  case  we  can 
go  as  we  please  and  history  becomes  a 
mere  chaos." 


Conclusion.  251 

It   has  already   been    pointed    out  that  it 
would  be  worse  than  useless  for  any  indivi- 
dual   inquirer    to    suppress    his    honest    and 
carefully  considered  impression  of  the  truth. 
Any  attempt  to  justify  such  procedure  would 
be  mere  sophistry.      It  is  not  by  any  kind 
of  pretences  that  truth  is  to  be  won.     But 
the  implications   of   the    question    as    above 
put    are    unjustifiable.      The    conception    of 
historical    science    itself   implies    a    measure 
of    values    quite    apart    from    our    personal 
philosophies.     In  the  first  place  a  social  fact 
or  a  social  change  is  important  in  proportion 
to  the  extent  of  its  action  and  results  includ- 
ing its  whole  duration  in   time.      But  apart 
from    this    we    have    another    measure    aris- 
ing from  general  agreement  as  to  the  funda- 
mental importance  of  certain  human  needs, 
of    which    the    need    for   food    is    the    most 
absolute.       An    historical    phenomenon,     we 
may  say,  is  important  as  it  affects  common 
needs  and  in   proportion  to  the  extent   and 
duration    of    its    effects    upon    them.       The 
measure  is  not,  of  course,  exact,  and  it  is  far 


252     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

from  comprehensive.  Once  we  get  beyond 
the  needs  that  are  really  fundamental, 
"need"  becomes  matter  of  opinion.  But 
of  "  needs "  not  generally  recognised  the 
historian  as  such  must  beware. 

But  there  exist  other  and  more  compre- 
hensive historical  measures  of  value.  The 
idea  of  progress  may  have  reference  to  the 
individual  or  to  states,  nations,  or  races,  or 
to  humanity  in  the  gross.  The  individual 
history  has  only  to  consider  as  a  factor,  and 
with  his  "  happiness  "  or  his  moral  elevation 
it  is  totally  unconcerned.  The  progress  of 
a  state  or  nation  history  will  measure  by 
reference  to  survival,  to  proof  of  fitness,  to 
energy,  security,  and  domination.  But  history 
has  also  its  own  idea  of  progress  for  humanity, 
and  in  this  idea  it  finds  a  comprehensive 
measure  of  value.  The  historical  idea  of 
progress  must  at  bottom  be  an  historical 
generalisation.  It  must  be  wide  enough 
to  include  all  the  known  facts  of  man's 
development  and  it  must  be  established 
beyond  doubt.      It  can  have  no    connection 


Conclusion,  253 

with  religious  or  ethical  systems  or  ideas 
of  happiness.  There  are  two  respects  in 
which,  reckoning  from  the  Stone  Age,  man 
may  be  said,  without  doubt,  to  have  advanced. 
He  has  advanced  in  'knowledge  and  he  has 
advanced  in  power.  Nor  need  we,  in  so 
saying,  shrink  from  using  the  word  advance 
as  meaning  something  more  than  increase. 
In  so  using  it  we  are,  indeed,  making  an 
assumption  that  does  not  stand  beyond  the 
reach  of  criticism.  Yet,  provisionally  and 
as  a  working  hypothesis,  we  may  fairly 
make  it,  since  the  general  sense  of  civilised 
mankind  will  be  with  us  in  so  doing.  Man 
has  advanced  in  knowledge  and  in  power, 
and  the  two  movements  are  not  the  same. 
For  power  comes  not  only  of  knowledge 
but  also  of  co  -  operation,  and  co  -  operation 
does  not  come  wholly  of  knowledge  but 
depends  also  on  moral  factors.  Let  the 
historian  therefore  fix  his  mind  on  these 
two  things  and  fearlessly  measure  all  change 
by  reference  to  them.  This  measure  he  may 
use  fearlessly   because   it  is  incontrovertibly 


254    Place  of  History  in  Education. 

based  on  history  itself.  Progress  in  other 
senses  or  in  some  yet  larger  sense  there 
may  be,  but  with  that  he  has  no  concern. 
If  history  is  to  play  the  part  in  progress 
which  it  yet  may  play  it  must  begin  by 
recognising  its  limitations. 


255 


XVII. 

POSTSCRIPT. 

It  is  only  by  assuming  the  existence  of  a 
system  of  education,  at  least  ideally,  that 
we  can  assign  to  History  or  to  any  other 
subject  any  "  place "  in  education  at  all.  A 
system  implies  a  theory.  Where  there  is  a 
theory  there  will  be  a  system,  even  though 
no  public  money  be  spent  upon  it :  and 
where  there  is  no  theory  there  can  be  no 
system,  though  we  spend  millions  a -year 
from  rates  or  taxes  upon  machinery.  If 
we  had  a  number  of  co- existing  and  rival 
systems,  then  History  might  have  a  place 
in  each  of  them,  and  if  so,  it  would  be,  in 
each  case,  a  different  place.  But  it  is  only 
on  a  theory  of  education,  based  on  a  theory 
of  values,  that  we  can  determine  the  place 


256     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

in  education  of  anything.  It  is  really  im- 
possible to  discuss  the  place  of  History  in 
education  except  in  reference  to  a  theory 
of  what  education  should  do.  We  might, 
indeed,  content  ourselves  with  pointing  out 
that  History  may  do  this,  that,  or  the  other 
for  the  mind,  according  as  you  deal  with 
it.  A  book  of  considerable  size  might  be 
written  on  these  lines.  It  would  be  a 
waste  of  paper. 

When  one  has  succeeded  in  reading  a 
book  through,  it  is  generally  necessary  to 
complete  the  process  by  asking  oneself 
what  it  has  all  been  about.  This  is  a 
question  that  may  well  be  asked  by  authors 
as  well  as  by  readers.  What  is  it  that  we 
have  been  discussing?  Here,  in  England, 
we  have  no  system  of  education.  Have  we, 
then,  been  trying  to  determine  the  "  place " 
of  History  not  in  education,  as  we  set  out 
to  do,  but  in  cosmic  space  ? 

A  system  of  education  can  only  be  based 
on  agreement  as  to  values.  It  must  allow 
for   difference,   but   it   must   be   founded  on 


Postscript.  257 

agreement.  On  our  agreements  a  system 
might  be  built,  and  perhaps  is  being  built. 
It  is  the  place  of  History  in  such  an  hypo- 
thetical system  that  we  have  been  discuss- 
ing. We  have  tried  to  reach  a  basis  of 
agreement  below  all  controversies.  Just  as 
the  teacher  of  History  is  bound  to  dis- 
tinguish between  his  personal  philosophy 
and  his  positive  knowledge,  so  the  educa- 
tionalist is  bound  to  suppress  his  own  inti- 
mate opinions  and  try  to  dig  down  to  the 
level  of  values  generally  recognised.  Only 
at  that  depth  can  safe  foundations  be  laid. 

If  we,  collectively,  had  a  religion,  many 
other  problems  would  be  solved  besides  the 
problem  of  religious  education.  Actually 
the  problem  of  religious  education  is  not 
an  educational  problem.  We  have  conflict- 
ing religions  and  we  have  no  religion,  and 
our  problem  is  to  reconcile  interests  rather 
than  philosophies.  Whichever  it  be,  the 
problem  is  not  educational.  But  if  we  had 
a  religion,  not  only  would  our  present  diffi- 
culty   about    religious    education    disappear, 


258     Place  of  History  in  Education. 

but  our  difficulties  about  the  place  of  His- 
tory in  education  would,  for  the  most 
part,  also  disappear.  For  a  religion  is  a 
belief  concerning  the  cosmos  which  deter- 
mines our  sense  of  values.  It  is  not  clear 
that  any  completely  satisfying  system  of 
education  can  be  founded  on  anything 
smaller  than  a  religion.  It  may  be  argued 
that  we  can  never  solve  any  of  our  educa- 
tional problems  till  the  religious  difficulty 
has  disappeared.  In  any  case,  provisionally, 
there  is  but  one  thing  to  do.  We  must  dig 
down  below  our  controversies  and  found  our 
system  on  our  agreements.  It  may  be  that 
we  shall  find  these  insufficient  to  bear  any 
very  lofty  or  weighty  structure.  It  may 
even  be  that  they  will  bear  nothing  but  a 
makeshift,  temporary  structure  of  planks — 
a  system  of  technical  education.  But  it 
will  be  well  to  make  sure  that  they  will 
not  bear  more. 


PRINTED    BY    WILLIAM    BLACKWOOD  AND   SONS. 


This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below 


2  9  ^3bURL 


NQM  Z  4  )^X 


6       34$  ( 
JUN  1119W 

Nl  AY  .3  119*®   j 

...231951 

Form  L-9-35m-8,'28 


WPDroura 
**  JONT1H5I7B 

SECT5  1B-011! 

mi  a 


115 8 01181  6351^ 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


AA    000  827  177    7 


